Legacies and Bloodlines
by nolandsman
Summary: A deaf and silent stableboy kept as a slave in the Great King's palace finds his monotonous life interrupted by a mysterious stranger. The events that follow his liberation serve to shape himself, his comrades, and to his great surprise, the destiny of the entire country of Hyrule.
1. All These Days of Silence

Here is a story, which, having remained simmering in my mind for literal years, I am finally allowing myself to jot down. I think I owe it that much. Plus it's my birthday, so this is kind of like a present to myself.

The narrative itself is unrelated to any one canonical installment in particular—it is more a response to the entirety of the Zelda mythos itself. So, if you like that sort of thing, read on! And remember, reviews are always appreciated.

* * *

"Tell me, dear boy, do you hear the chirrup of birds, or the breath of wind through grass, in this still and haunted place? I do not, my apprentice, I do not."

Etran Olrani, "The Tale of the Wanderer" from _Ordish Children's Stories_

* * *

Talon had not mouthed a word, but his intent had been perfectly clear. He dropped a tin bucket, stained with grime, into Link's hands and shoved him toward the stable doors. Link knew this inevitable errand had been coming—they had used the last of their allotted drinking water to wash the beautiful, fire-red mare for her exhibition, since the animals' water was likely to leave her coat dirtier than before. Link had no qualms with the decision; he could stand the well water, with its translucent, gelatinous muck bobbing at the surface (it was easy to scrape off to get the real water underneath), he could even stand its metallic, almost moribund taste. But he could not tolerate seeing a filthy horse presented to the King.

So it was with a spirited acceptance that Link trotted across the muddy compound, bucket bouncing against his stained pants. His boots sank into the wet dirt, and he fervently hoped a well-meaning guard mage might send a few gusts of wind across the corral to dry it—Link had spent so long polishing the warhorse's hooves he would break down if he had to see them muddied at the last minute. He made a mental note to tug at Talon's waistcoat when he got back with the water, and let him know his concerns.

At the paddock gates, he approached the two guards, glinting in dark armor. The way each of their helmets' shadows shifted slightly told him they had given him nods of approval. Link was not an uncommon sight around the palace; he posed no threat.

He lugged the bucket down the street, toward the well. Behind him faded the sharp smell of mud and fresh hay, large bodies breathing, bristling fur—and before him rose the familiar acrid stink of the city, the thick sourness of men and women, the softer, more palatable scent of their animals, the occasional waft of weekly washing, the fetor of waste disposal. As he descended down the cobblestone street, from the high echelon of the palace grounds and surrounding land down into the city proper, the smell grew more pungent.

A pair of young girls ran across his path, dark-skinned and red-haired, leaving a faint aroma of freshness in their wake. Link knew it would be a few years before the city robbed them of that smell—he himself was losing it, day by day. Even after he had sprung through his growth, seemingly waking up taller each morning, growing broader each evening, he had maintained his own scent of bright childhood until very recently. Perhaps his constant proximity to animals provided him with the means of avoiding smelling bewilderingly human.

While the feeling and scent of his early youth was marred by the stifling aura of the city, he could still recognize and enjoy other smells and sights that seemed to be all but lost on others. He could catch a whiff of a kitten on a high windowsill, see its thin fur bristle when he looked up and gave it a smile. He could smell a storm coming, when the air thickened and the sharp sting of electricity permeated the atmosphere. He knew when to hide himself under a roof, while others seemed oblivious to the coming deluge, still wandering in the streets, unprotected from the inevitable heavy rain thickened with acid from the city's distant factories.

Whenever he was unsure of a scent, he would turn his attention to the stable hounds and watch their movements, look at the thin twitches of their whiskery noses, lips curling above teeth, black fur on their necks raising slightly, tails lifting in anticipation. The hounds told him when to make himself scarce, and when it was safe for him to wander the stable and corral freely.

For everything else, he could rely on Talon. Throughout the day the man would provide Link with tasks, looks and gestures, hand him a plate of gruel when work was done, make sure he was sufficiently wrapped in his ratty blanket when he settled down in the hay amongst the hounds and horses for the night. Even when Talon left for his own quarters at the other end of the yard, his presence lingered, the soft scent of mud and sweat, the warmth he brought to the air. He would often light a candle and place it on the high shelf, beside a faded, ripped pictograph of a young girl, red hair outshining the candlelight even from its discolored frame. Talon left the candle to burn all night, providing Link with enough light to watch the breath of the animals slow as they sank into sleep. Link always rested best on the nights when the candle flickered gently in corner.

The evening before the warhorse's exhibition, he had hardly slept at all. Talon had not explicitly expressed to him the mare's rapidly approaching meeting with the King, but he didn't need to. Link could tell by the way Talon's hands shook slightly, almost imperceptibly, when the stable master visited him, that something was afoot. The stable master was tall, slim, thin hair pulled back into a ratty ponytail, but his presence was always commanding, and always prefigured some grand event or another: a long hunt for the King, a countryside expedition, a reception, parade, exhibition. No matter the occasion, its success invariably depended on the form and fettle of the beasts involved. Whether or not the King's pages and guards returned smiling or grimacing hinged ultimately on the stable master, and by extension, Talon and Link.

They had made doubly sure the fire-red mare had been washed thoroughly for her presentation. Talon spent hours gathering her pale mane up into knots, bunching her tail into the traditional tight bun used to keep it out of the path of swords and spears during battle. Link had washed her himself, sponging her muscular flank and polishing her hooves to an unmatched sheen.

In the preceding months, Link taught the warhorse all he knew about people and what they might want from her. She had been a kind, understanding creature, responsive to the flicks of his eyelids, the waves of his hands and the nudges of his heels on her sides. He had only to tug on the base of her mane, gently, in one direction or the other, to get her to turn, merely had to lean forward to coax her into a gallop, press himself into her to make her slow. Sometimes when he slid off her back and gently bumped his forehead against hers as thanks, Talon would approach from the other end of the corral, awed, eyes wide, mouth opening and closing meaninglessly. Link hadn't the means to explain to him the nature of his relationship with the large warhorse—it seemed to be something so rare, something so incredibly natural to him and so foreign to others, that expressing to Talon how he behaved with the horses would be like trying to teach a fish to breathe air.

Link knew this horse would serve the King well. She was strong, intelligent, kind, humorous in her own way, and responded to the slightest kicks and nudges with utmost avidity and promptness. He knew he would miss the magnificent creature during those times when the guards would lead her away by the harness, out for a fox hunt or other such expedition. But, horse or otherwise, they all had to serve the King in their own ways.

Link had only seen the King once, from a distance. He had been so splendid, standing grand and absurdly tall atop the royal carriage, procession ornamented in the winter festival's colors and glowing with the light of ancient magic. People had poured out onto the snowy street to watch him ride by, white fur draped across his shoulder, arms spread in celebration. Bits of colored paper flew from windows as he rode down the city's main boulevard, landing in the wet snow at the feet of his team of black horses.

Link had been small then, perched on Talon's shoulders as the cavalcade danced by, backlit by the deep lights of the winter festival, red and green and royal blue. A team of guards followed the King's carriage, shining tubes of brass raised to their pursed lips, marching in unison. Link did not remember much of that celebration—food and drink flowed freely, and when an older stablehand wasn't trying to force a mug of hot mulled wine down his throat, his memories were coated with the dreamlike half-mysticism of childhood—but he did remember, very clearly, the swell of love and loyalty that burst in his lungs, that made its way up his throat and watered his eyes. He had leaned forward on Talon's shoulders, reaching out to the King so eagerly he'd tumbled right off and crashed into the spectator cheering in front of them.

It had taken the celebration days to die down. Even now, years later, as Link walked toward the well, he suspected that there was still the stray scrap of confetti from that very festival under his muddy boots, wedged between cobblestones or hiding in the gutter. He didn't remember a winter festival so lively, so full of joy—then again, he didn't remember another winter festival when the Great King himself had made an appearance.

Link turned a corner from the main avenue, boots clicking against the aging stone. Above him a few unseasonal clouds gathered, and he felt the trembling energy of an imminent storm in the air. It was subtle, and told him he still had plenty of time to fetch the water, bring it back and witness the King's approval of the warhorse before the first drops fell. He took a deep breath, the acidic wet air filling his lungs, and turned the last corner to the well.

Thankfully, there were few people gathered around its edge. Link trotted up to the grey masonry, laying his bucket on the side and waiting his turn. A little boy, pale and thin, stared at him with gigantic black eyes from the other side of the well, thumb stuck so far into his mouth it looked like he was trying to eat his own fist. He wore no clothes but what looked like a pillowcase wrapped around his middle, mud streaked on his pale skin.

Link tried to smile at the kid, but he continued staring him down with his uncanny, sunken eyes. Link decided that his attention was better allocated to getting his bucket tied to the lowering rope, slopping up enough water to keep him and Talon alive for the night and getting back to the palace before the action started. Link lowered his eyes to the dark water, the heat of the little boy's impoverished stare burning his skin. He quickly lowered the bucket, gathering a swell of black water, and pulled it back up. A stern, angry tap on the shoulder told him he'd done something wrong.

Bucket in hand, he turned to see a tall, overweight woman behind him, hands on her hips, black hair drawn back into a tight bun. Her thin lips parted and twisted like two pale worms over her yellowed teeth, the occasional bead of spit flying from her mouth. Link could tell by the way her eyebrows drew together, almost meeting in a wrinkled puff of hair in the middle of her forehead, that she was less than pleased with him. Her lips formed shapes unfamiliar to him, her sagging second chin flapping like a cock's wattle against her neck. She gesticulated, pointing the starving little boy at the other side of the well, and Link could see her ruddy palms were worn and rough with work.

He just bowed, like he always did when in doubt. He lowered his head, quickly, sincerely, and made his escape. He grabbed the bucket of water, sloshing a bit over the side, and sidled out from between the woman and the well. Before she could stop him, he held the bucket as firmly as he could and trotted back up the street.

All the way back to the palace grounds, he did not look behind him, did not look for a confrontation. He ignored all sights and smells that risked enticing him to tarry, and hurried up the main boulevard. When he reached the gates to the palace grounds, the guard nodded at him to pass without motioning for him to put the bucket down and show his mark.

When he arrived back at the corral, he saw no one out in the yard, save for the fire-red warhorse, saddled and ready, eyes closed, back hoof bent slightly into the dirt, as it always did when she prepared for something. Link could tell she knew an important event lingered on the near horizon, but she might have been anticipating the oncoming storm they both could feel brewing in the air.

Link dropped the bucket at the stable doors and sauntered over to her. He approached from her side, as she preferred, and lay his hand on her quivering flank. He brushed a few flies from her hair and lay his head against her. He could feel the pulse of her blood through her side, minuscule ripples of skin and muscle, rhythmic and deliberate. He stroked her, and she contentedly shook her head.

Link knew he should make himself scarce for the arrival of the King, especially since he could see no other stablehands about. He patted the warhorse goodbye, but when he turned to make his way back to the stable, he noticed one of her tight ropes of mane had come undone. Link looked around for any sign of possible interruption, and set the bucket down. He could not let this horse—his favorite horse, his greatest friend—go before the king looking disheveled and worn. So he carefully stood on the bucket, feet balancing precariously on opposite edges, craned his neck over hers and examined the damage. It looked like a quick fix—he could repair her mane and get out of there well before the King arrived. He pulled out a streak of white mane and twisted it tightly, wrapping each hair with great consideration. He tightened the finished knot and let it sit atop the crest of her neck. Link stepped off the bucket, backed up, admiring his own work, and realized with an inner sigh that now his knot was the only one that struck him as decently executed.

Talon had done this job himself, but he was dreadfully inept at plaiting of all sorts. Link knew he had no choice but to redo her entire mane; there was no way the King would approve of her in this unacceptable state. So Link glanced around him furtively before undoing all the knots and letting her mane hang unrestrained along her neck. He gave her an encouraging pat before slowly, carefully starting the whole process again.

He began at the top, where a puff of white forelock fell over her black eyes, and moved down along her neck, each knot perfectly spun, twisted into a beautiful point. Even constrained to a tiny buns, her striking hair shone, each knob glinting like the tall lamps that lit up the city's streets at night.

He had made his way almost to her withers, leaving a perfectly composed mane behind him, when over the elegant crest of the warhorse's curved neck he spied Talon emerge from the stables. He ran, waistcoat wrinkling over his bulging belly, waving his hirsute arms in a panic. Link squinted at him, at his frightened, shining eyes, and realized he must've done something terribly wrong. He glanced back over his work—no, that wasn't it, it was absolutely perfect, so…

He felt a presence behind him. Strong, intimidating, he could tell the shape and mien of his visitor by the tiny, pulsating waves of heat that made him stiffen slightly. Almost imperceptibly, the hair on the back of his neck shifted—breath touched his hackles, but not the familiar, calming rush of air from horse's nose. It was deliberate, slow, human.

Link's hands fell to his side, trembling slightly. He forced himself to tear his eyes away from the infuriating, unfinished puff of mane near the horse's shoulders, slowly stepping down from his bucket. He swallowed a lump in his throat and forced himself to turn around.

He didn't see much, since the man behind him was so large, so close, but he saw enough. He caught a glimpse of the dark, dark skin, the bold copper hair, the royal jewel glinting on furrowed brow, with a jolt of terror and awe, he threw himself down into the dirt, pressing his forehead into the mud desperately, prostrating himself at the feet of his King.


	2. A Stranger

"Of all the tribes scattered across this great land of Hyrule, the Sheikah are by far the most mysterious. Secretive in their ways, deft in the arts of illusion and espionage, it is that very mystique that defines the clan. To know too much about the Sheikah is to desecrate the very essence of the culture."

Lady Ronia of the House of Faron, _The Historical Atlas of the Peoples of Hyrule_

* * *

Lingering in the gray shadows of the stable's roof, tucked against its panels and shingles like a cat, a dark-clad figure crouched. A loose black hood obscured her features, the jutting column of a chimney hiding the rest of her body from prying eyes. She leaned over the rotting wood, spying intently into the paddock below. Her slender, long ears perked inside her hood, listening earnestly.

The King in all of his glory, draped in a sanguine cape, stood across from an equally red warhorse. Thick, armored arms crossed, thin lips drawn into a tight scowl, he towered over nearly everything around him, with the exception, of course, of the magnificent horse. The King's trusted general, Haema, dressed perpetually in his panoply, stood at his side, face darkening with fury. She could see the Ordishman's hand clench, knuckled armor clinking, as he stepped forward, laying a foot on the shoulder of the prostrated stableboy.

The spy sorted through the reasons Haema might accompany his King to something as mundane as the showing of a new horse. There were few explanations, and all of them discouraging. Palo had been right about Haema's recent intimacy with the King—perhaps he was right when he insisted there was something terrible brewing on the horizon. She did not want to have to concede to Palo—he could be such a terror when proven right—but she could not help but share in the sinking feeling this was no ordinary meeting, and that was no ordinary horse.

The King's eyes did not remove themselves from the magnificent beast's body, whereas Haema seemed more engaged in punishing the stableboy for his insolence. The large, red-faced general stomped on his shoulder, demanding to know why he had seen fit to show such insolence to his divine ruler.

Another man, hairy and squat, sporting a thick mustache, sprinted desperately to the King and his general, throwing himself into a supplicant bow.

"Esteemed sires," the man stuttered, hands wringing, eyes on the ground. "Permission to speak."

Haema, foot still on the prostrated boy, turned to the King, who gave a slow, regal nod.

"I am not worthy," the stablehand stammered, bowing ever deeper. He waited a moment in deference before continuing: "He is deaf, your majesty. He did not hear your approach, otherwise he would've shown the proper respect. I will punish him appropriately for his misbehavior, rest assured."

"It's a little late for excuses, isn't it?" Haema growled, driving his heel into the stableboy. He twitched in pain, but didn't cry out. He remained pressed against the ground in the most reverent kowtow, hands folded in the dirt above his blond head.

"Calm yourself, Sir Haema." The King's voice came strong and deliberate, infused with the calmness only true power can impart. He tore his eyes away from the horse and lowered them to the stableboy. The kid didn't look up, didn't move—he remained prostrate, shaking ever so slightly. "Remove your foot from the poor child," the King commanded. Haema, still rubicund with anger, obeyed. The King turned to the other stablehand, still locked in a deep bow. "You may assist him to his feet. He cannot help his condition." The man scrambled to pull his underling from the dirt, nodding his head profusely and thanking the King. The monarch himself merely turned back to the horse, putting one giant foot in the stirrup and hauling himself onto her back. He settled into the saddle, and glanced down at the stableboy slowly wiping the dirt from his face, eyes still downcast. "Just make sure he is more aware of his surroundings in the future."

"Yes, your majesty, of course," the stablehand replied, pushing his deaf underling into the safety of the shadow he cast.

 _You're one to speak of awareness,_ the figure found herself thinking. She watched the King deftly maneuver the warhorse around the corral, turning her this way and that, pushing her into a gallop and slowing her to a trot, cape flinging behind him like a wake of fire. The charger glided in a perfect ring, elegant, obedient, muscles twisting in the grey light. Even with the unkempt portions of unfinished knots in her mane, she was still singularly awe-inspiring. She reared her large head beautifully—truly, she was the only horse of the size and strength worthy to carry a man like the Great King across the plains of Lanayru.

Palo had most definitely been right. The King planned to do something big, something that necessitated travel, or worse, combat. This steed was bred for battle. There could be no other use for so strong a creature. She or Palo would need to pay a visit to the palace armory to see if the blacksmiths hammered any plates for the steed or her rider.

The horse loped back to where Haema stood, metal-plated arms crossed, next to the timid stablehands. The King slowed her, and she obeyed with a vigorous snort. He slid from her back, something of a smile crossing his broad, dark features. He replaced a stray strand of bright red hair and brushed a few specks of dirt from his shoulder.

Haema bowed slightly. "Is it all you wished for, sire?"

"And more." The King's yellow eyes settled on the two stablehands. "Give the stable master my regards, if indeed he is the one who has trained her."

"Your majesty…" the swarthy servant started quietly.

"Spit it out," Haema commanded.

The man meekly stepped aside and gestured to the golden-haired boy.

"Is that a joke?" Haema spat. "Him?"

"Yes, sires. Longeing, bitting, backing—all his doing. He is… rather gifted."

"Fascinating." The King stepped forward, leaning over the stableboy, examining him. From the spy's vantage point on the roof, she could see the young man lower his head even farther, obviously uncomfortable at the close proximity to his godlike ruler. He seemed to be doing all he could to keep himself from falling back into the dirt at the King's feet. The King stared at him for a few seconds, at the back of his lowered head, before turning again to his general.

"Haema, give the boy a gold coin for his efforts."

"Sire."

Reluctantly Haema threw a shining piece at the stableboy's feet. He didn't move—at this point paying attention to the money rather than his King would've been an affront so impudent it might warrant a hanging. The boy just remained bent in his bow, ignorant of the words exchanged over him.

"I expect to see similar excellence in the future," the King said, turning toward the stable gates. "Do not disappoint me."

"Yes, your majesty," the stablehand stammered, following the pair, bowing obsequiously.

When the King made his way out of the yard, back into the safety of his grand palace grounds, the figure drew her cloak tighter around her and slid down the side of the stable roof. She was blind to the King's movements in his palace, and worse yet, his guards would be winding their way about the battlements at this hour. If she stayed on the roof, they would no doubt see her and raise an alarm.

She would've liked to stick around and spy on him, but she knew lingering at this fragile hour invited discovery. She had so much to do before she left the city—and peeping on the King was the lowest of necessities. If her information was correct, they would have plenty of time for that in the near future. But she couldn't banish the feeling that she was wasting precious time, and jeopardizing her clan's entire strategy, by letting the King live a little while longer.

She knew she could try to snip the bud before it bloomed, to cut off the King's ambitions before war reared its head. But to try would be to risk herself, her entire tribe, and the fate of the country. Despite her eager hand wandering to the knives on her thigh, despite her imagining flying from the rooftop to drive a blade into the back of the tyrant's neck, she dropped to the ground harmlessly. She slipped away from the palace grounds unseen, out to the main boulevard of the city. She pulled her hood back over her head as the first droplets of a rainstorm began to fall. She knew soon enough it would freeze, and the city streets would be soggy and piled high with grimy, dirt-smeared snow.

She detested the snow of the Capital. It was so different from the soft, pure mounds that blanketed Kakariko in the winter, swallowing all sound and worry. She even preferred the blizzards of Mount Eldin to the wet, dirty hail that fell angrily from the skies above the city.

If she was perfunctory, if she was smart about her mission, and if she was just a little lucky, she could escape the city before winter rolled around. She could return to her village with Palo at her side, and a shard of hope.

According to those operatives who came before, the last carrier of the old royal bloodline lived somewhere in the eastern quarter, safely integrated in the populace and ignorant of her heritage. Hopefully, for her sake and that of the country, the rest of the city remained equally uninformed—if the King got word of the remnants of the deposed bloodline, he'd no doubt sack the entire quarter and put to death any Hylian unlucky enough to vaguely resemble the portraits of toppled kings of old.

But as it stood now, the last scion of the old royal family was alive and well, and—if the other Sheikah spies they had sent earlier were correct—rather young. She could still be taught, stripped of any loyalty she might harbor for the King, still be brought up knowing her duty. She would hone her skills in the hidden precipices of Kakariko and face her obligation to take back her kingdom, to reestablish order. But that was in the far future. For now, the steps toward Hyrule's liberation were small, seemingly inconsequential.

The cloaked figure slipped against the wall, out of the sightline of a group of passing guards. She sank into the shadows and they stomped by her without incident. She glanced up at the darkening sky, knowing she would have to return to Palo with her report, with the embarrassing admission that he'd been right about everything—about Haema's involvement with the King's recent escapades, about the threat of war looming on the horizon.

 _Stupid Impa,_ he'd say. _You should know by now I'm always right._

She could only hope he was also right when he told her what Doctor Balras told him: the heir to the old throne was somewhere nearby. It made her clench her teeth to know that he should be correct regarding so many things at once—it was a surefire way to make him insufferable for at least a month—but she, too, had a strange, elevating feeling that they were close to stumbling upon something important, something crucial.

Her grandmother, or so her father told her, was born with a remarkable power of foresight. Time and time again, Impa wished that she had at least a modicum of that woman's talent—then perhaps she would not be stuck so often in aimless ruts of confusion. It would save her plenty of hours of frustration and heartache, but the only things resembling premonitions she got were vague senses of restlessness, uninterpretable feelings, unsupported guesses.

They were sometimes wrong, sometimes right—she assumed she had been born with no such gift as her grandmother had, but merely possessed that unremarkable talent that all people shared: good old gut feeling. She had no proclivity for prognostication, no belief in the intricate plans of gods and demons, no certainty regarding her own guesses. So she did not find it odd that no visions came to her regarding the location of the royal heir. She would not expect her mission to be so easy. What really struck her as remarkable was that the presence of that deaf stableboy stayed with her, like the pieces of a meaningful dream fractured upon awakening. As she crept down the street, wrapped tightly in shadow, he was the closest thing she had to a supernatural vision.

The boy himself was unexceptional—just another young sycophant in the King's employ, showering the monarch with adoration while ignoring his own oppression. He was probably just as loyal to the Dragmire family as any other citizen, just as helpless, but for some reason, his mud-streaked face reappeared in Impa's mind again and again. He comprised a vivid image: his strong jaw and kind eyes, the posture and vigor indicating he was on the cusp of manhood, and the timidness and humility to downplay the fact. She had not personally seen the brand that marked him as palace property, but it was reasonable to assume he had one. He seemed so uninteresting, interchangeable with any other well-meaning Hylian youth, it struck her as odd she would find herself thinking about him, especially when more crucial things should occupy her mind.

Perhaps what little gift for premonition her grandmother had left in the recesses of her genes was trying to tell her the boy had something of a future, besides remaining crushed under the heel of the King and his henchmen. Whatever her gut was trying to tell her, she wished him all the best. But she knew she couldn't worry about such an inconsequential peasant at the moment.

Impa had better things to do with her time. She had to report back to Doctor Balras for the night, settle down with Palo in his back room and get what little rest she could before she resumed her reconnaissance in the morning. She would have to tell both of them about Haema, and the King, the showing of the red warhorse, and then apologize for not having gathered more information. Palo might just cross his arms and shake his head, but Doctor Balras was usually more obliging.

The good doctor was Hylian in origin, with pale skin and dark hair common to the people of the northern plains provinces. Impa never knew from which region he hailed, but he had lived in the Capital for the better part of three decades, and knew the city well enough to prove an invaluable ally. He provided hints, rumors, maps, secrets, whatever she or Palo might ask of him, with no complaints, and with strangely unwavering politeness.

Apparently he had known Impa's father when they were both young, even before Mandrag Elgra's advance on Death Mountain. They had both practiced as physicians on opposite sides of that battle, but Balras had since turned his coat, preferring instead to assist the Sheikah rather than shrink in quiet obedience to the King's demands. She had never met the man before her most recent trip to the Capital, but she was nothing but thankful for his help.

In this city, under this crown, she could use all the help she could get.


	3. Link and Talon Spend their Reward

"There is a habit, among the citizens of the Capital, to refer to a pub or other such establishment as a 'milk bar.' The origin of this monicker is unknown—perhaps it is a remnant from a stricter, more subdued era, for milk is certainly not the foremost item on their bills of fare. But I did not travel to the most disreputable establishment in town to discuss linguistics with the locals. I came to confirm if the famous Chateau Romani is as enticing or fantastical as the rumors that precede it."

T. L. Malona, _Life and Travels of a Wayward Bard_

* * *

The smile on Talon's face and the way he held his newly-acquired gold coin to his heart told Link that despite the day's failures, despite his unpardonable disrespect toward his divine King, something had gone right. Link had been a little distracted staring at the mud, wishing that the King's general would take his foot off his shoulder, to know if the King truly approved of the fire-red warhorse. Talon's expression after the exhibition had been complicated—he'd beamed for a moment, but his eyes were wide with fear and anxiety, his face red with anger.

After a few stern knocks to the head (Link was very sure he deserved much, much more), Talon drew him up in his arms and squeezed him tight. Link had been dumbfounded at the interaction—it was rare, charged with emotion that he hadn't the means to interpret. But it didn't last long, because Talon quickly turned his attention to the gold coin halfway buried in the mud.

Link led the horse back into the stable, untangled her smooth white mane, removed her saddle and brushed her off, unwilling to let the image of the King in all his finery slip from his mind. Talon hurried him along with his chores, preferring to help him bustle through the stables with the evening's tasks rather than let him linger on the strange interaction he'd shared with the King and his hard-faced subordinate.

When Talon motioned for Link to don his only good waistcoat and change out of his soiled clothes, he knew they would be leaving the palace grounds for the remainder of the night. Link did not mind accompanying Talon to the building down the street, alive with light and drink—even though he knew he'd be deprived of a restful sleep among the hounds, he was often provided with something hot and tasty to keep himself occupied. The warm drinks, which rendered him torpid and content, and the short duration of proximity to other people, relaxed him. He was allowed to sit in the corner nearest the fire, which was an especially anticipated treat in the early winter. Sometimes there would be a group of people on the raised platform near the west wall, toting strange devices of wood and brass, and their movements would send comforting vibrations through the floor to his feet. He'd fallen asleep more than once on the cushions by the fire of that place, which was just as well, since if Talon spent too much time at the bar, he would splay himself across its length and refused to get up until late morning. The barkeep and his wife, either out of natural kindness or their fondness for Talon, would provide both of them with blankets and let them stay the night, if it wasn't too busy.

Clouds gathered as Talon and Link left the palace grounds. Link's nose told him to bring an umbrella, so he opened it above both of them as they made their way down the cobblestone boulevard, minutes before the first drops fell. The bar in the distance, adorned with colored lamps and smelling of sharp alcohol, stood at the end of the street, sandwiched between two dilapidated brick buildings, nearly hidden in the shadows of torn awnings and rotting wood beams. It was a close enough walk that even in some of his worse states, Talon could stumble back to the stables for the night, if the barmaid insisted they leave. She rarely did, however.

When they arrived at the familiar double doors, stained glass glowing with color and warmth, Talon took the umbrella from Link and followed him inside. The place seemed especially crowded that night, alive with the vibrations and movements of patrons tapping their feet, picking up and setting down their mugs, shifting on the wooden benches. Talon made his way up to the bar, pushing his way between the broad shoulders of two working men to get the attention of the barkeep.

Link found his usual spot by the fire miraculously unoccupied, so he sat himself down, massaging his sore shoulder and reveling in the warmth of the flames. He yawned, thinking he might pass out even without the help of a hot drink or two. He sank back into the cushions of his seat, fabric worn with age and use, and watched Talon at the bar, motioning furiously to the barkeep and his wife. Link closed his eyes for just a moment, feeling the floor tremble softly under his feet, enjoying the deep scent of the fire, the smells of food and ale wafting from the kitchens, and his stomach rumbled.

Then Talon was standing over him, mug of mulled wine in hand, barkeep's wife at his side. The man gestured toward Link, leaning over to her ear, lips moving quickly. Link sank deeper into his seat, hoping that he hadn't done something worthy of punishment, but when the barkeep's wife knelt down beside him, it was with a gentle touch that she reached out and grasped his bruised shoulder. Link sat still as she unbuttoned his waistcoat and loosened the ties on the tunic beneath, tugging the cloth down over his arm.

Link had seen the injury while he changed earlier in the evening—he dismissed it as a mild soreness that would heal in a few days. But when the barkeep's wife saw the discoloration that crept from the top of his shoulder down to the black curves of his brand, she made a face as if he'd lost his entire arm. She prodded it gently, frowning at his mild flinches, before gathering her skirts about her knees and rushing back off into the crowd. Link watched her go curiously, distracted only by the cup of wine that Talon shoved into his hand. He drank slowly, as usual, but the wine tasted different tonight, sweeter than normal—often, when the barkeep served more aromatic drinks, it meant the coming of winter.

Link did not know if anyone else was aware of this slight difference in taste, but winter wines were his favorite. They had been, ever since that night so long ago when, after he'd had a few sips of an older stablehand's drink, he'd had the privilege of seeing the Great King and his cavalcade march down the street, decked in the finest festive paraphernalia. And now, even after he'd botched his first personal encounter with his divine ruler, the drink provided him with a subtle sort of comfort. Even if the King would never see him again, never condescend to suffer his inferior presence, he would remember how Talon had used his rightly-earned gold coin—an actual, _physical_ sign of the King's approval (Link found himself growing giddy at the thought)—to buy an evening of relaxation and fine, spiced wine.

He found himself smiling a little as he raised the cup to his lips. When the barkeep's wife returned with a hot compress and lay it on Link's shoulder, he knew he could consider the day, despite all the failures on his part, a good one. The barkeep's wife always made Link's day a little better, whether by slipping him an extra piece of bread in his meal, making sure his cup never went dry, or, as in this case, tending to his scrapes and bruises like a mother dog licking at her pup.

The kind woman had taken a liking to him long ago, but her affection toward him surged since the previous year, following her first pregnancy.

Link knew he was something of a weathervane for Talon's acquaintances at the bar—whenever Link brought the horses in early in the year or swaddled the hounds' puppies in extra wool, he'd catch the denizens of the main boulevard do the same, wrapping their children in furs, bringing their potted plants inside, preparing themselves for an early winter. Whenever a malady of some sort broke out, Link was always the first to take to bed, and the entire district slowed down for a little while to avoid the disease they all could sense coming.

It wasn't uncommon for each neighborhood to have its own seer of sorts—and Link did not necessarily detest his position, despite it sometimes bringing unexpected and unwanted attention. Usually it was harmless or meaningless. Last week a little girl with a monstrously pregnant cat came up to him and, with the flick of a few fingers, asked how many kittens she would have. Link took the cat in his arms, feeling her grey stomach for the familiar bumps, counting the twitches of tiny heartbeats, and showed on his hands, in no uncertain terms, there would be four. It turned out there were five kittens in all, but one had been born dead.

He did not understand why other people could not deduce the same things he could—they always struck him as willfully oblivious to the somewhat obvious hints and meanings nature would drop his way. But everyone seemed nothing short of perplexed by what he considered mundane abilities. It was much harder for him to predict whether they would react with fear or admiration to his assessments than it was to predict the advent of a rainstorm, the health of a litter of puppies, or the spread of a common flu.

The barkeep's wife herself had always been skeptical of his little quirk. Over a year ago, on a night quite similar to this one, when she was still swollen with her first child (Link could tell it was her first because she had that peculiar smell about her that older mothers often didn't), he had sensed a shifting in her abdomen, a strange twisting of mass, an odd and new feeling. Link, unexpected and uninvited, rushed behind the bar to make sure she was all right, and surprised at the visit, especially in such a vulnerable state, she shooed him out. He had tried to express his concerns to her, that something anomalous was happening, some distress of the fetus or an early arrival, but she waved him away. He was so insistent and obnoxious, she had him (and consequently, Talon) thrown out of the bar. Later that night she had her first child. The baby was small, early, a little sickly, but it had survived its first year and a half, and was probably tucked away, sleeping peacefully upstairs as his mother tenderly attended to Link's bruised shoulder.

When she had wrapped him up and given him enough wine to satisfy her, she returned to her place behind the bar, serving other customers. Link himself sat contentedly snug in his cushions, compress laid against his shoulder. He finished the last gulp of wine and Talon took his mug. When the man retreated back to the bar, Link settled back, the heat of the fire on his face, and prepared to fall asleep.

Then something—something that was not a vibration, not a smell—forced his eyes to snap open. He sat up, a disturbing jolt of strange energy running through him, throbbing past his shoulder and down his arms. He looked around for the source of the sinking feeling, trying to figure out if a patron had contracted the pox, if a female customer would miscarry later in the day, or if a fight would break out between two belligerent drunks. He spied none of the usual wellsprings for his unease, but he did manage to catch a glimpse of the bar door swinging shut behind an enigmatic figure. The cloaked person swept unheeded through the establishment—the men and women drinking on either side of it took no notice of the cape or the long, almost supernatural shadows it cast. Link narrowed his eyes, the sinking feeling deepening in his stomach, trying to catch a glimpse of the face under the hood, to at least identify the entity forcing his heart to twist in knots. He gripped the arms of his chair, leaning as far as he could without being suspicious, to get a better view of the figure.

The cloak collapsed on a bench on the opposite side of the room. A thin, long arm, wrapped in grayish cloth, emerged from the cloak and reached out to the adjacent table. Gloved fingers gripped a mug of ale and brought it to the figure's face, so deftly and quickly they did not catch the notice of the man to whom the drink belonged.

Link watched the stranger sip at the oblivious man's drink for a few minutes, in complete awe. He looked around him—no one else seemed to have noticed this mysterious visitor. He certainly had never seen anyone like it at this establishment before—much less the entire city.

Apparently he did not escape the stranger's notice. Considering the rest of the crowd was incognizant of this cloaked newcomer, he should've known he'd draw attention to himself by staring. The stranger raised its head, the hood rising high enough for him to make out a dark pair of feminine lips and a wide bridge of nose. The woman's head rose higher, and he could see brown skin cast in shadow, and a pair of unnervingly red eyes. He'd never seen anything like them—only the crimson eyes of the crows that flocked around the palace grounds, seeking food and refuge from the rain.

He tried to tear himself away from those disturbing, avian eyes, but found himself locked onto them. The stranger raised her brows, opened them wider, and the sinking, painful feeling in his gut intensified. But as much as he would've liked to, if only to dull the terrible feeling, he could not tear himself away from her.

He could not tell how long he sat there, helpless at the other end of her gaze. She seemed to be picking him apart, peeling him layer by layer, unfolding him, searching through him, and then stitching him back up. He wanted to dispel the vulnerability her stare instilled in him, wanted to keep his own hands from trembling like a child's, but she held him there, paralyzed, as she sized him up.

Then, as unexpected and enigmatic as the stranger herself, a smile appeared on her face. It was calm, natural smile, and it immediately dissipated the terrible feeling in his gut. Instead, something else, something much more mysterious, grew inside him. It had an air importance to it, an urgency Link hadn't experienced before. But it was also strangely exhilarating—he couldn't pin down why exactly his heart started to race excitedly.

A short tap on his shoulder drew his attention away from the stranger and back up to Talon, who carried two mugs of wine in one large hand, and a platter of steamed vegetables in the other. He set the meal down before Link and urged him to drink. He accepted the offerings with grace, but couldn't help himself from looking back over to the other side of the bar, seeking the mysterious cloak and the stranger inside. When his eyes again settled on the bench where she had sat only moments ago, he found it empty. Whether she had sunk back into invisibility or left the bar entirely, he couldn't guess. All he knew was that now that she had disappeared back into the crowd, he suddenly felt inexplicably, utterly alone.


	4. The Girl in the Window

"If history is written in blood, and laws in stone, then what in all the goddesses' names do we use to pen the poetry of the heart?"

Dietrich Aren, "On Verse"

* * *

Link searched for the mysterious woman for days. When he finished work at the stable, when Talon waved him away to make some free time for himself, he crept along the alleys of the city, visiting and revisiting the pub where he had first glimpsed her, stalking the square around the marbled, mossy fountain clogged with grime.

The King had not visited the stables since that fateful day his warhorse had been presented, leaving the animals and their caretakers in a quiet state of anticlimax. The horse herself lounged in semi-somnolence, perhaps lulled into restful idleness by the sense of relief that permeated the stables, or the silent complacency of a horse that knows she's done right. There was little work to be done, little inspection to worry about. Even the stable master hadn't shown his face in a while, which meant Link could spend less time shoveling waste and more time seeking out that strange woman.

He didn't have much to go on besides the memory of the sensations her presence brought on at the bar. So when he wandered through the cold, cloudy streets, blue scarf wrapped tightly around his neck, he would follow his gut and the inexplicable emotions inside—wherever they would lead him. Most of his escapades were fruitless, and left him cold, hungry, and discouraged. He could not shake the thought that the stranger had left forever, and he was again alone in the crowded city.

But he did not give up. There was something about her, something he instinctively sought out, that drew him to her; it almost felt as if he couldn't give up seeking her if he tried. He knew that regardless of his hopelessness, and the minuscule likelihood he would find her in a city this big with his gut feelings alone, he would not stop searching until he faced her again. But what he would do when he found her, he hadn't the vaguest notion. Perhaps he would simply stare at her as he had before, perhaps grab her hand and squeeze it in a desperate grope at communication, perhaps bow to her in deference, the way he had been taught to greet all those superior to him.

He stopped in his tracks when he got an inkling of that familiar stress deep in his gut. He bent over slightly, clutching at his stomach, and surveyed the street. He raised his gaze to the wet awnings, scanning the stairs and bridges of the district, but saw no one. He kept onward, following his instinct where it led him.

He found himself wandering out of his district, into the inner ring of the commoner's quarters. The houses here were large, stately, but not quite as expansive as those of the noble district, which surrounded the palace grounds. Window boxes full of herbs hung below the tinted lattice casements. The walls were smeared with fresh stucco, when they were not showing off bare, neatly-cut stone. The houses seemed sturdy, free from decay, and the cracks and roof tiles were not caked with bitumen as they were in Link's own district. Few people wandered the streets in this part of town—the ones he came across seemed either mildly confused by his presence or disinterested altogether. Passers-by were all well-dressed and seemingly purposeful, trotting off to wherever the wealthy went for the evening. Thankfully, no one tried to stop and question him—they accepted his bows with a hurried grace, and left him alone.

It struck Link as odd that the woman he pursued, who had so nefarious a demeanor, should be traveling the brightly lit and clean streets of the upper quarter. Perhaps she was a thief, scouting for a lucrative target to burgle before slinking back into her element of poverty and shadow. Perhaps she was something worse than a mere robber—but the strange feeling inside his viscera, leading him on, seemed to be colored not only with caution, but with admiration, even downright enthusiasm. Inside the fearful memory he had of her shadowy face lingered the image of her kind smile, and the feeling of that fright leaving him in a restorative rush.

At the end of the street, he caught a glimpse of a robe, black as night, hem still discolored with the mud from the poorer neighborhoods. He picked up speed, dashing down the street and turning the far corner, only to see the mere suggestion of a shadow disappear beyond another bend. He carefully trotted after the movement, sidestepping a hurried pair of men dressed in silk, gold-trimmed mantles. He ducked to avoid a swinging wooden sign, danced around a shopkeeper closing her windows for the night, slid across the clean stone on his muddy boots.

Link reached the alleyway where he had seen the figure disappear, and entered, briefly wondering if she had set a trap for him. Obviously, she knew he was following her—the urgency in her movement and the rhythm of her steps could tell him as much. But he still had no idea whether or not she was going to harm him for hounding her.

Link slowed to a stop when he saw the street ended in a high wall of stone. If the woman had climbed such a structure, he could not follow her, but if she lay in wait, perhaps he could kneel and show her he meant no harm. He crept to the end of the alley, searching for any sign of her, but all he saw was the cobblestone street, the high wall, and a few wooden waste bins. He sighed, slipped his hands in his pockets and turned around. The strange feeling he got from her presence no longer hovered in his stomach—he had lost her.

As he started back toward the entrance to the alley, a sharp scent caught his attention. It was fresh, a little citrusy, like the flowers that bloomed in window boxes in the springtime. The scent came to him from above, and he lifted his eyes.

His mouth dropped open when he spied a girl, pale and long-haired, above him. She opened the window and leaned out, pinning her dripping laundry to the thin ropes that stretched between the walls of the alley. The enticing scent of soap drifted down to him, and he watched her carefully hang out her clothes to dry, holding the pins in her mouth when she needed both hands to stretch the fabric over the line. Her hair hung beautifully down past her shoulders—straw-yellow and brighter by far than any other he'd seen.

There was a smell about her that reminded him of newness, of nobility. She seemed to be the only creature in the city untouched by dirt and grime, unencumbered by the burdens of overwork. Her slender arms were white and smooth, her dress embroidered with colored lace. Link had never seen a girl like her up close—occasionally he got glances of the upper classes at festivals and other city-wide gatherings, but now, standing merely a few paces away from her door, a story down from her window, he could swear he was in the presence of something supernatural, even godlike. He resisted the urge to bend one knee as his heart rose into his throat.

By divine blessing or incredible luck, she happened to glance down at him. Her blue eyes were bright, large, undiminished by the city's hardships. When she returned his stare, he guessed she must've been about his age, but her eyes seemed older, so much wiser, than the rest of her. She looked at him a moment before giving him a wide smile. He smiled back, suddenly remembering to take off his hat as a sign of deference. He bowed and she put a hand over her mouth, grinning.

Suddenly, she averted her eyes and turned, distracted by some happening in the room behind her. She gave him one last kind glance and retreated into the shadows of the house, closing the casement behind her and leaving her laundry to dry in the feeble, chilly sunlight.

Link breathed a sigh of something like relief, but his heart did not stop pounding in his chest. He took a deep breath and made his way back to his own district, memorizing the route.

* * *

Late in the afternoon the next day, Link retraced his steps to the girl's window. The casement was shut tight, glinting in the late autumn sunlight, yesterday's laundry missing from the line. He stood beneath the window anyway, searching for any sign of movement behind its flat, opaque crosshatches of color. He saw a few shadows move beyond the glass, but no one appeared.

The tense gnawing in his gut returned, for moments, just slightly, and a terrible thought struck him. Perhaps that mysterious woman, who engendered so much anxiety in him, had laid her eyes on the girl and meant her harm. He couldn't fathom why, but he had long since learned to accept his inability to understand many things around him.

So he stood guard under the window, waiting for another bout of that passing stress in his stomach, waiting for the subtle smell of his own neighborhood that no doubt clung to the woman's cloak. He curled his toes inside his boots, waiting for the minuscule vibrations of approaching feet.

But he felt, and saw, nothing. He lingered under her window until the sun crept behind the distant steeples of the palace, until he spied the glint of glass pass over the opposite wall. He turned his eyes upward to see the window open, reflecting the red sun.

To his utter joy, the girl poked her head out, smiling, and looked down at him. She seemed happy, unharmed, and he smiled back. Her long hair, gold in the sunset, tumbled alluringly about her shoulders. She opened her mouth, lips forming shapes he couldn't make out. He pointed to his own ears and made a negative gesture. She squinted but seemed to understand, so she held out her hand. _Wait_. He knew that signal well enough.

She disappeared back into her house and he crossed his arms, leaning against the amber wall of the house, heart pounding furiously. It seemed like an eternity before she returned, small object in hand. He raised his palms to her as she dropped the thing delicately from her window. It fluttered down in a streak of violet, and he closed his hand around it gently, feeling the familiar smoothness of a flower petal against his skin. Between his fingers, he saw the curl of a small purple lily—she must be growing them in that room of hers, away from the freezing air.

He smiled up at her, bowed his head in thanks, and she gave him a wave before shutting the window and disappearing into her room.

* * *

Over the next week, he returned to her window every afternoon. The vague, disconcerting feeling he'd had in his stomach the past few days had almost disappeared entirely, and he had not seen so much as the shadow of the enigmatic stranger in as long. He was more interested in the girl at the window, who, without fail, leaned out the casement every afternoon to greet him.

After she had gifted him with the lily, he had nearly skipped back to the palace stables, not willing to take his hand off the soft petals. He held it in his pocket against the cold, even though he knew all too well the flower would not last long. Still, she had gifted him with something sweet-smelling and beautiful, and he had every obligation to return the favor. So when he got back to the stables, well past sundown, he collapsed in the hay and held the flower to his nose, thinking furiously.

There were plenty of smells he enjoyed in the stables—the fresh scent of newly turned hay, the earthy musk of a horse's flank, the calming odor of a newly-struck match. None of these he could bring to her very easily, but he had to deliver something to her—neglecting that duty would be like withholding tributes from the gods themselves. So he settled on one of his favorite smells of all time: one that was seasonal, and fleeting, which made it all the more valuable to him.

The next afternoon, when he had finished his chores, he motioned to Talon that one of the hound's puppies was coming down with something. He picked out the largest one, the one whose smell was strongest, and wrapped it in his arms. Talon gave him a reluctant nod of approval (Link's leisurely escapades out into the city had not gone unnoticed), as he left with the tiny creature under the pretense of finding it a veterinarian. Of course, the palace had its own, but Talon seemed to trust him when he took the pup under his arm and waved his hand toward the city, toward help.

He held the little dog close to his heart as he sauntered down the street. If he had not been such a familiar sight to the palace guards, him leaving with one of the King's creatures in hand would've gotten him arrested—or even beheaded—on the spot. But when it came to animals, the palace denizens deferred to him. It was something of his own kingdom.

The black puppy snorted eagerly, trying to wiggle out of his jacket, pink tongue dangling, the mild, milky smell of its indefinable breath filling Link's nostrils. He took a deep inhale, tugging the animal closer, nuzzling it to keep it calm. It settled back down in his jacket, still curious, still trying to poke its head between the buttons, but he gripped the nape of its neck gently but sternly, as he had seen its mother do many times.

He trotted quickly through the crowds, past the muddy well, up the stone steps to the nicer quarters, and arrived at the girl's window in good time. He stood under it, waiting for her to notice him, and when she unfastened the casement and leaned outside, a bright look of delight crossed her face. It only grew brighter when he lifted the puppy out of his jacket and held it up for her to see.

She put her hands on her cheeks, smile broadening, and he could see her jump up and down, just slightly, in excitement. The lace on her bodice shuddered as she covered her mouth, cheeks reddening. Link grinned back, cradling the puppy against his chest and motioning with his free hand for her to come down. The mere presence of a creature as young as this must've been a treat, but in his opinion, it did a disservice to all hound-kind to not appreciate the truly sublime smell of a puppy.

She lowered her hands and shook her head sadly. He motioned again, hoping that she simply did not understand. But she didn't relent, whipping her head forcefully back and forth, hair flying like yellow silk. Link's smile faded at her refusal, but she leaned out the window and mouthed something to him, intensely, earnestly. He pretended to understand, giving her a calm nod.

Her delight faded quickly, and her eyes fell, the hints of a pout on her small lips. A look of anguish crossed her face, and she grabbed the sides of the casement and shut it quickly, retreating back into her house.

Link stood in shock for a few seconds, cradling the puppy, but eventually tucked it into his coat and dragged himself back down the street. He hung his head, trying to figure out why she refused to join him on the street. The pity that washed over him was not a result of her missing out on a most delightful scent, but the fact that if he could not lure her down from her window with something as undeniably attractive as a puppy, he would never lure her down at all.

It shouldn't surprise him. There were myriad reasons she could be confined to the upstairs of her home. She might be chronically weak or ill—although he caught none of the usual telltale scents of sickness on her. Her family might not allow her to leave their house without explicit permission, or perhaps she simply did not like the idea of going outside in her current state of dress.

But the most likely possibility, the one what lingered at the forefront of his mind despite his best efforts to push it back, was that she simply could not be seen in the presence of a boy like him. He admittedly did not know much about the intricacies of the city's caste—all he knew was that he was expected to bow to those above him and lower his eyes. He did not have to worry about responding to anyone below himself—even most of the stable animals garnered more respect than he did.

He really should've known better. He should've considered himself lucky enough to stand outside her window and stare. He hugged the little dog tighter to himself and made his way back to his own quarter, where he belonged. He sighed. He knew it wasn't her fault—she seemed to tolerate his presence well enough. It was his fault for being what he was.

He didn't know how in the world he thought it was appropriate to bring a dirty animal into her presence. He punished himself thoroughly on the walk home, but resolved that if all he could do was linger on the street adjacent to her house, he would have to be happy with that.

So he returned. Again and again, he returned, and each time, she greeted him at the window, smiling and waving to him. She gifted things to him now and then: another flower, a scrap of paper, at one point a piece of candy wrapped in lovely yellow paper. He had come to her woefully under-equipped, devoid of gifts, but he brought her what he could. The perfect feather of a crow that had alighted on a stable fence, a fresh, unlit candle, a shining horseshoe, which he thought about tossing up to her but reconsidered when she waved her arms in a laughably frightened way. He could imagine the metal crashing through the latticed window in a pray of sharp glass, so he just held the horseshoe in the sun, letting her look at its glint.

He knew her gifts to him were unsurpassable, and it was with a lingering sense of inadequacy that he showed her these things, but he couldn't help himself from being thankful for merely having the opportunity to stand in her presence. And she seemed content enough with his pathetic gestures, so each day he invariably looked forward to meeting her.

Of course, Link's now common disappearances did not escape Talon's notice. When he came home every night, he would grab him by the shoulder and turn him around, searching his eyes for any hint of culpability. But he had nothing to show in his eyes, and even when he'd dared to go so far as to bring a puppy out of the King's kennels, he returned it safe and sound—in the past, he had never done anything to warrant suspicion, no sneaking, no trysts, nothing. But Talon, watchful animal as he was, was not so convinced.

He had tried to keep Link busy the entire afternoon with chores both of them knew were unnecessary. He had to sweep and re-sweep the steps, turn the hay over more than he could count, and clean every stall, every corner of the stable. He was tasked with brushing the red warhorse more than was necessary—but neither of them minded. The horse would stand contentedly, shuddering under his brush, and he knew by the way she held her head she understood that he had other things to do. He got nothing but good wishes from that horse, and thanked her profusely for it.

Talon approached his absence with more suspicion. Link knew he had no choice but to obey his undue demands without protestation, but he worked so diligently and so quickly, by the time his usual time for escape rolled around, Talon could not cook up anything more for him to do. Reluctantly, shaking his head, the stablehand let him go, crossing his large, hairy arms and frowning.

After more than a week of daily visits, Link had learned not to be perturbed by his own tardiness. No matter what time he managed to show up, she was always there, always up in her window, waiting for him.

Except for today. When he skidded to a halt in his usual place, he looked up at the window and saw no movement, no sign of her presence. He waited, leaning against the opposite wall, as the sun sank behind him. He put his freezing hands in his pockets, rubbing them against his thighs to warm them. He jogged in place for a while, before giving up and reaching down by his feet to pick up a rare, stray pebble. He threw it gently at her window, and although it hit the glass and bounced off, she didn't come. He waited until nightfall, then tried again. Still, she didn't come. Eventually, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to scope out the smell of the place. He focused his attention not on the window, but on the house, the street, the entire neighborhood.

Slowly, he realized something was wrong. Not just because of the girl's absence, but because of the unusual stillness about the place. Link lowered his head, looked to his left, then right, then dared himself to walk up to her front door. He knew shouldn't, but he wasn't about to give up on his one human friend, the one person besides Talon who had shown him any kindness. He stood before the massive oak slab, heart pounding. Reluctantly, he reached out for the knob and turned it. Something clicked against his palm, and the door slowly opened of its own accord. He backed up, again looking around him, but the smell of wrongful stillness intensified in his nostrils and he forced himself to take hold of the knob and push the door open fully.

He wrinkled his nose at the overpowering scent of flowers and fresh wood. Not sure exactly what he was thinking, he slipped inside, closing the door behind him. He stepped through the empty front entrance and moved onto what he assumed to be living quarters.

The room was in a state of complete chaos. Cushions sat on the floor, an overturned wooden table had one leg snapped off—the leg, tinted at its edge in something wet and red, lay discarded in the corner, splinters scattered across the floral carpet. The chairs sat in ruined pieces, shards of glass dotting the floor. Ornate cabinets lay face-down over their broken contents, overturned forcefully. There was no sign of anyone—whatever had transpired here had done so well before Link arrived.

Fear twisted in his stomach. He forced himself to tread across the room, tiptoeing around shards of broken glass and porcelain, heart fluttering in his throat. As he made his way across the room toward the intricate wooden stairs, he thought of the mysterious, cloaked stranger, without whom he never would've found his way here.

Anger boiled in him. If anyone had done something of this sort, it would've been her. She was shady, she had those weird, red eyes and that unnerving stare… she looked the thief—but if it had been her, there was no reason he wouldn't have felt her presence. She had such a strong impact on him the first time he'd seen her, he was certain he would recognize her proximity. Perhaps he was merely too late.

He clenched his fists, wondering what to do. If he dragged Talon to this place and showed him the destruction, he would be in for a beating. He wasn't even supposed to be anywhere near this neighborhood in the first place. If he brought a palace guard or one of the neighborhood militiamen, they might forgive him for pointing out the chaos, but he'd still have to face reproach for trespassing… Either way, it seemed like he'd be in for trouble.

His predictive skills proved accurate, if not premature. He saw the pale shadow on the wall only fractions of a second before, in a swift and concise motion, he was struck on the back of the head. He barreled forward, tumbling into the wooden stairs, as pain spread from the base of his neck to the corners of his eyes, blurring his vision. His forehead met the corner of a stair, heavily, painfully, and he blacked out.


	5. Impa

"The great castle at the heart of the Capital stands proudly behind stone walls, black towers thinning gradually, seemingly ending only at the clouds themselves. The building itself is split into thirds, each portion representing a facet of that great golden power of legend. The buttresses that connect each of these portions are stylistic of the pre-war period, but have features that no less define them as distinctly Gerudo in origin. At the very center of the courtyard between these immense structures stands the metal-wrought colossus of the conqueror king himself, Mandrag Ganond."

Wenstan Illar, "The Architecture of Lanayru Province"

* * *

Link struggled to open his eyes. His head throbbed, his lips cracked painfully when he moved them. He slowly reached up with a shaking hand and lay it over his forehead, wincing at the pain.

There was hay around him. There was hay, and dirt—but old, rotten, foul-smelling dirt. There was dry wood and more than a little iron, torches, the smell of vomit and decaying food, of other people. And there was something more bizarre, a scent that was both strange and still recognizable to him. With that scent came the familiar twisting in his stomach, the fear and excitement that told him that after his long week of searching, he had finally found the stranger once again.

He turned his head, forcing his eyes wide open, and looked across what he discovered was some sort of pen. She sat opposite him, brown hands folded, staring at him. He didn't move, but drank in her image—her peculiar red eyes, the short, messy shock of almost-white hair contrasted against her dark forehead. A distinguishing mark lay on the skin above and below her left eye, streaks of red reaching almost up to her hairline, and one sharp triangle arcing down, toward her jaw. Link had never seen such brands before; hers were nothing like the mark he bore as a palace servant.

He tore his eyes away from the mysterious woman and instead focused on his surroundings. They seemed to be confined in a room about the same size as a horse's stall, and with twice the filth. Metal bars ran from floor to ceiling over the only entrance, mud smeared across the stone floor. Link pulled himself painfully to a sitting position, and he appeared to be on some sort of splintery bench that may have been meant to act as a bed.

The woman watched him carefully, her uncanny eyes following him as he sat up and blinked, forcing his vision to clear. The smells around him, the vibrations in his feet, the distinct feeling of the black stone as he lay his hand on the wall—he knew that if he wasn't in the palace itself, he was somewhere close.

He didn't know exactly why they confined him, but he could guess it had to do with hoping to find a friend in a girl who clearly outranked him. He didn't see what was terribly wrong with that in principle, since she never physically stooped to his level, but evidently that didn't matter.

The image of her home, torn to pieces, emerged in his mind, and somehow he knew it was his fault. He didn't know if they had taken her whole family just for her condescending to gift him a flower or two, but he couldn't shake the feeling that if he had merely left her alone, she would be safe and sound in her room, perhaps waiting by the window, combing her lovely yellow hair. He doubted they would punish her the same way they would punish him, so the why, the true _why_ of this whole mess still eluded him.

He knew he didn't understand much, especially about laws and customs and manners, and he never would, but he longed to know why a girl so innocent had to have her possessions destroyed and her house ransacked. He hadn't smelled or sensed her nearby when he'd explored the ruins of her house, so perhaps she'd escaped before the violence started. He knew there was no sense in guessing, but he couldn't imagine her in a pen like this one, cooped up like a common animal.

He realized the woman across from him was moving her mouth, rhythmically, deliberately. He pointed to his ears and shook his head, and she nodded in understanding. She pointed to him and stared deeply at him, holding his attention. Like the fateful moment in the bar when he'd seen her from across the room, she seemed to hold his gaze on her by force, as she carefully mouthed what he knew was her name or title.

 _Imma_.

It was an odd name. Then again, he could be mispronouncing it in his head. He slowly raised his hand, palm facing toward him, to her mouth, and nodded for her to repeat herself. The quick puff of air that tickled his skin corrected his pronunciation.

 _Impa_.

An equally odd name. He opened his mouth and pushed out his breath, mimicking her lip movements, to confirm he had it right. It was the only way he'd ever learned Talon's name, through careful correction and plenty of mouth movement practice. Still, he preferred to keep the names inside, because if he opened his mouth and released them, invisible and untrustworthy, into the air, he could not account for where they would go and who would catch them. Names were much safer in his head, where he could keep them and mull them over to his heart's content.

Impa nodded slowly, not taking her eyes off him. The slight twitch in her brow told him he'd said it wrong in some way, but she hadn't the inclination to correct him. It appeared she had other things on her mind.

She closed her eyes, momentarily, and Link was released from that powerful stare. She took a breath, then lifted her hands and started to make slow, deliberate motions. Although gestures were by all means not universal, he considered himself something of a polyglot in that aspect. The way Talon waved his hands was quite different from the barkeep or his wife, who in turn motioned in nearly an opposite manner as the succinct stable master. Link spent a few moments looking the woman over, and was able to piece together her intent and her motions.

 _You. Follow. Me._

He'd been told that many times before. Follow, obey, do not question. Her gaze left no room for protestation, and he bowed his head. Perhaps if she knew what she was doing, she could get them both out of this miserable place and he could find Talon, fly into his big, protective embrace and beg for forgiveness. He knew the palace guards would have mercy on him—he hadn't done anything to warrant this treatment—at least, he thought not. They knew him, they knew he harbored no ill-intent against his King or any other palace hands. He was their friend, their ally, their faithful stableboy. As long as he kept quiet and did what he was told, they would forgive him. He could go back to his friends, go back to the new litter of puppies sleeping in the back of the stable, go back to the fire-red warhorse and her exquisite mane.

But what of his human friend? He could not know where she was or if she was all right. He knew that it was too early to disregard the possibility that Impa had been behind the ransacking of the girl's house. Perhaps she had simply been caught at the wrong time in the wrong place, and like him, thrown in this prison. But he had no way of knowing.

When Impa reached out and took both his hands in hers, his heart seemed to stop for a moment. The intensity in his gut increased, but instead of fear, he was filled with a mysterious, invigorating awe. The commanding stare she gave him made him certain that she had some sort of plan, and he couldn't help himself from collapsing under the weight of her will, promising both to himself and to her that he would help carry it out.

She seemed satisfied with his subtle consent, and gave him a weak half-smile. He tried to return the favor, but he couldn't banish the image of her sneaking into the girl's house, ransacking the rooms, forcing her family out into the street. Smile tainted by that tweak of his imagination, he must've given her more of a grimace than anything.

Her gaze suddenly moved toward the bars. Link tried to follow her eyes, but she quickly slid over to his side of the cell and pushed him back down on the bench. She made a motion over her eyelids and hung her head—evidently she wanted him to pretend to be asleep. So he lay back down, folded his hands under his cheek and pretended to close his eyes.

Impa, not taking her gaze off the bars, slowly reached into the black band at her waist and pulled a thin cord from the folds of cloth. She wrapped it around her wrist, slowly, subtly, fist clenching. She perched on her splintery seat like some sort of bird of prey, eyes locked on the gloomy hall beyond the bars. She sat perfectly still for an agonizing few seconds before Link felt the faint but steady vibrations of footsteps shudder through the wooden bench and into his bones. He lay still, watching Impa as her shoulders moved slightly forward, her body tensing. Link recognized the scent of armor-sweat, the torch-kissed, smoky flavor of a well-worn cape, and knew a guard was about to pass by.

Impa was ready for him. Before the guard even registered that their particular cell was occupied, she was at the bars, gripping one horizontal slab of iron with one hand, cord unwinding with uncanny elegance in the other. She snapped it between the bars, its length stretching meticulously through the air, catching the guard on the wrist. The cord wrapped around his arm with such quickness, such precision, he did not notice he had been snagged until Impa yanked him toward their cell. With one fluid, powerful movement, she pulled the cord taut, and the stunned guard flew toward them. Impa twisted the rope slightly in her hands, and his arm's trajectory changed, sliding smoothly between the bars and into her waiting grasp.

She sidestepped around his arm, now halfway in the cell, wiggling helplessly, and reached for the back of his cape. She took a handful of thick cloth and jerked him toward the bars, his helmeted head smacking against the metal so hard Link could almost see the strips of iron vibrate. Impa wrapped one arm around the guard, in the vulnerable gap between his helmet and breastplate, and squeezed.

Link did not know how long she sat there in almost intimate contact with the guard. She held the man against the bars, unmoving, while he flailed desperately. She crouched calm and still, like a cat gripping a helpless, fluttering bird. Her eyes narrowed, her body unmovable, tranquil, and for a brief moment, a pang of jealousy struck Link. He was a nervous mess himself, and couldn't help but sit up, heart pounding, the nausea of fear and anxiety twirling in his stomach. He knew he was panicking, shaking like a mouse, but Impa paid him no mind. She merely held the guard against the bars, arm wrapped tightly around his neck, until his struggling stopped, his arms fell to his sides, and he went entirely limp.

Link's heart was pounding somewhere in his dry and aching throat. He knew by letting this woman harm the King's guard, by sitting back and watching as she defied the divine ruler himself by destroying his property, he was implicit in something akin to treason. He did not know how they would punish him for falling in with this mysterious and heretical Impa, but he knew he had little choice now. When she glanced back at him, still clutching the limp guard, he fell into those determined eyes, and knew in his gut he would go with her, commit the same crimes as she did, whether he wanted to or not.

He watched her intently when she reached into the folds of the guard's cape and pulled out a shining set of keys. She released the man and he slumped to the floor. She stood, slowly, and looked back at Link. He nodded to her and she reached out on the other side of the bars, trying one key after the other, until a smile crossed her face. She leaned, sliding the heavy bars to one side, and motioned for Link to follow her.

Unsure of what else to do, he traced her steps. She led him out into the torchlit hall, smelling of piss and dirt. A few other cells lined the walls, ratty, filthy people clinging at the bars, but he did not see the girl among them.

Impa dragged the body of the guard back into their own cell and lay it in the near corner, positioning him behind the stone pillar that functioned as a doorframe. She tucked his legs under him and sat him up in the shadows, and sprinkled hay over the limbs she could not shove into into the darkness. Link looked back at the body—he had to squint to really see it poke out behind the pillar, so it might escape the notice of an unmindful guard or two.

The other prisoners may point it out, though. He supposed that was a risk that Impa was willing to take, because when she led him down the prison hall and up the stairs, she ignored the filthy prisoners clutching at the bars, shaking them so hard dust fell from the ceiling. She ignored their reaching hands, their open mouths, and moved on. She stuffed the set of keys into the black band about her waist where she kept her cord, and jumped up the stairs toward the prison door.

She lingered at it for a moment, head pressed to the bars, watching for any sign of an oncoming guard. Link slipped safely into her shadow, heart pounding. He couldn't see nor sense anyone coming, but then again, his nose only worked best when its target was so close that, in this case, it might be too late to run. The only person he could smell was Impa herself, and it was indeed a peculiar smell. The air around her had a freshness to it he didn't recognize, it almost seemed cold, biting. She smelled like the palace gardens—of course, a lowly stableboy like him had never been allowed inside them, but occasionally, when the wind was right, he would get a whiff of enticing, crisp scents he couldn't entirely place. She smelled a little less floral than the gardens themselves, but she retained that air of growth, of life—

A tree. She smelled like a tree, he realized. He had once seen a tree up close, when he was a child. He had stumbled across it, squat and strong, growing from a neglected alley, roots clinging to the earth between displaced cobblestones. He did not know how the thing grew to such a size without anyone noticing, but shortly after he discovered it, the palace guards came and cut it down. He had spent the next few days racked with guilt, knowing that had he not stumbled upon it, it might still be standing, unnoticed by people who would care to chop it down.

Impa, almost sensing his distraction, turned to him and squeezed his shoulder. Still bruised from his encounter with the boot of the King's general, he flinched a little, but the look she gave him comforted him, inexplicably. She nodded toward him before sliding one of the keys into the prison door and opening it wide.

She grabbed his wrist and led him out into the stone hallway. Enveloped in grey shadows, they made their way down the cold, damp-smelling place and came upon a second door. Link could see the sky, clouds lit silver with sunlight, through the thin, barred window at the top of the planks. He took a deep breath, and fell into step behind her as she creaked open the door.

Link could smell the rain. He could smell the grass, the sweet, lively scents of plants. His heart pumped furiously in his chest, pounding against his ribcage so hard he could swear he felt it vibrate in his head. He followed Impa out into the palace grounds, green and lush, and stayed in her shadow, looking around for any sign of guards. He saw none—which was probably just as well, because he was unsure if he would try to run from them or throw himself at their feet in suppliance, to secure some mercy for himself.

Impa dragged him into the safety of the meticulously cut shrubberies that lined the grounds. She ducked behind them, pulling him into the prickly, leafy shadows, and crept along the wall. Link steadied himself on the grey stone, peering through gaps in the tight, small branches, until Impa deemed it was safe for them to emerge.

High above them loomed the three great towers of the palace. They were so tall they seemed to arc in Link's vision, bending toward the clouds, black, thin, with silver-lined windows stretching along their length. He had seen them from afar—he had a fair view of two of them them from the stables, but the biggest, the most magnificent, stood too far north for him to see from his own domain. Now, it loomed over him, sending his heart thumping in his chest, forcing his eyes to run up its spectacular height, all the way to where its tip kissed the sky. He almost felt like it would be proper to prostrate himself before the monument, the same way it was only proper to prostrate himself before the King.

But Impa did not afford him the time to tarry and genuflect. Link did not know where she was taking him so hurriedly, but he hoped it was somewhere near the stables. If he could make it as far as that, he could throw himself at Talon's mercy. Yes, Talon would help him out of this mess. And the King might recognize him as the boy who had trained and groomed that magnificent warhorse, and forgive him. Or, he realized with a shudder, the King might recognize him as the servant that failed to show proper respect and bow when he made his entrance.

Either way, he saw little choice in the matter. He would stay with this woman until he could either secure his own safety, or find the girl with the yellow hair. Impa didn't seem to be eager to let him out of her sight either, since every few seconds she would turn her head, making sure he was with her.

She sidled along the wall, looking left and right, and motioned for him to follow closely. She waited until it was safe, and then sprinted across the grounds, quick as a shadow, lowering her head and running nearly at ground level. He barely kept up with her, flailing clumsily, but he managed to catch up, diving into the shade of a massive, iron-wrought statue. He almost felt safe under its huge, raised arms, like he could stop and rest under its masculine physique without worrying about discovery. He looked up at it briefly, at its absurd height, the raised weapons, the beard it shared with the current King, and wondered at the uncanny likeness. He didn't have much time to compare the statue to the King himself, because Impa was whisking him off, tugging him by his wrist, across the grounds to the southeast tower.

They skidded to a halt before its doors, Impa pressing herself against the wall, between the black stone and the generous hedges. Link followed her, squatting in the leaves, and she turned to him, surveying him with those strange eyes of hers. She lowered her head, eyebrows furrowing solicitously—he supposed she was asking him if he was all right. He nodded back, and she led him, crouching, along the dirt, until she came upon a window. She peered through the glass carefully, eyes darting, and raised her elbow. With one quick snap, she struck at the window. A crack crawled along its length, and she struck again, shattering it. With one last survey of her surroundings, she jumped through, gracefully, with little effort. She had to reach down to drag Link in behind her, who cut himself more than once on a stray shard.

He only hoped he wouldn't leave too obvious a trail of blood behind him. Impa snuck along the hall, high and wide, suits of armor displayed on either side, standing tall above the lengthy blue carpet. The place struck Link as eerie, almost lifeless—despite the obvious presence of a few guards here and there.

Impa skirted around them deftly, dragging Link behind her, sprinting up steps and down halls, staying out of sight. Every so often she'd stop and look around—not for guards, Link could tell—but for something else, something a little subtler. She gripped her forehead, brow wrinkling in effort, and seemed to be thinking assiduously, before leading him down yet another hall, up another flight of stairs.

It was all nonsense to him. Especially when Impa arrived at one of the upper floors of the tower and started to kick doors open, one by one, sticking her head in and retreating with a sour look on her face. Link merely followed her, unsure, fearing that any moment a guard might arrive and drag them back down to the dungeons. He wished she would stop lingering, wasting time in such a dangerous place, telling himself that it was all pointless, whatever she was looking for could be anywhere, any room in this vast palace—

Until the faint, nearly unnoticeable scent of flowers reached him. His heart skipped a beat and he followed Impa eagerly; he had half a mind to start kicking doors down himself. Impa made her way from one end of the hall to the other, then back again along the other side, returning disappointed each time. Link started to get the feeling that despite the suggestive scent, they might be mistaken, that this was all a pointless endeavor, until she broke down the last door. Inside, curled on a lush bed overhung with drapes of silver fabric, lay the yellow-haired girl.


	6. The Girl Awakens

"Above all, silence is key. Where there is no silence, there is no knowledge."

Sheikah Proverb

* * *

The girl lifted her head when she saw them enter, eyes widening, inflamed with tears. She rubbed them once, twice, as if trying to clear the image of Impa and Link standing in her doorway. She pulled herself into a sitting position and blinked at them, mouth hanging open. At first she seemed startled at their arrival, but she quickly slipped off the bed (Link noticed her feet were bare, and white as porcelain, apart from the bloodstains that dotted her ankles), and ran toward them. She flung himself to him, arms outstretched, and fell against him. The harsh trembling of her body and the wet bursts of air that flurried against his neck told him she was sobbing. He carefully wrapped his arms around her shoulders, tugging her close.

Her scent hit him full force—that soft, fresh odor nearly knocked him to the ground. But he held her steady, staring at her shining hair, at the slender curve of her pointed ear poking out from the yellow strands. He felt himself heat up, his cheeks flushing, and he swallowed a lump in his throat. Slowly, carefully, he tried to pry her from him, but she only held tighter, heaving sobs forcefully into his shoulder.

It was Impa who finally peeled her off him. She grabbed the girl's arm gently but emphatically, and twirled her so they faced one another. Impa lifted her chin, tilting her face up toward her own, and her lips started moving. Link kept his gaze on her eyes, on the resoluteness and stringency, and knew the girl would be coming with them. She bobbed her yellow head in affirmation, tears still streaming down her face. Impa wiped one or two, and the girl seemed to accept the touch, though not without reluctance. When the girl had calmed down enough to dry her eyes, Impa stood, leading her to the doorway. Link followed closely, afraid of being left behind in that cold, luxurious room.

Impa took the girl's hand in her own, and she in turn grabbed Link's, so they made a clumsy train of bodies as they sprinted to the stairwell. He stumbled after the two, Impa occasionally glancing back at the girl and telling her something he couldn't make out. He just followed along, trying his best not to trip over his own feet.

Impa led them both to the top of the great stairwell and stopped, peeking down the shadowy curve of steps in the dim light. The yellow-haired girl skidded into her, and Link followed, nearly causing them to tumble down the stairs in a tangle of bodies. After giving him a brief, damning look, Impa crept down the stairs, sidling along the walls, ducking under the small, stained-glass windows that emanated a cold blue light. Impa stopped them at the bottom of the stairs, raising her hand and leaning out into the hall before motioning for them to follow her.

They crept after her, dodging from shadow to shadow, ducking behind suits of armor, lingering in the nooks between windows and pillars. Link surprised even himself with how far they got before they came upon any guards. When Impa shoved them down a small, shady corridor, positioning herself between them and the ambient light of the wide hallway, Link was surprised that it took them so long to come across any hinderances.

Impa pushed them back into the shadows, pressing herself against the wall as two heavily armored men marched by, black metal glinting, red cloaks trailing on the carpet. Each held a massive halberd, sharpened and shining, but neither took notice of the movements in their periphery—Link wasn't sure exactly how much they could see through the narrow slits in their helmets.

Impa watched them carefully, leaning out into the hall after they passed by. She stepped back across the carpet when she deemed it safe, and dragged the two of them behind her. Link could barely keep up, clutching madly at the girl in front of him. Every once in a while she'd turn her head to see if he was still with them, her bright, blue eyes shining, still swollen from tears. But she kept onward, in Impa's long shadow, down the intricate halls and decorated corridors. Link thought despite his circumstances he should probably be thankful for the only chance he'd ever have at a tour of the finest piece of architecture imaginable.

Link had always dreamt of finally entering the royal palace. He'd harbored so many daytime fantasies, ankle deep in horse manure, of pleasing the great King so much he would personally invite him into its hallowed halls. Sometimes he saw the stable master dress himself up and make off toward the inner grounds with his head held high—Link liked to imagine that he would occasionally sit at the King's banquet table as a reward for his service. He would dine on hen, pheasant, steaming potatoes and butter—maybe a wild boar the King had killed for himself on one of his hunts (many of Link's fantasies were inextricably associated with foods of all sort—with the exception of the morning after the winter festival, when the palace servants were awarded the leftovers from the feast, he had to settle for cabbage, half-rotten tomatoes, garlic and onions, and occasionally a rabbit caught on the grounds by one of the King's excellent hounds).

Link—not without a small jolt of terror—realized that at this moment he was the rabbit on the castle grounds. He didn't belong here, he knew he was an unwelcome pest. And if the hounds smelled his fear, smelled his guilt, they would no doubt come tearing across the castle grounds and drag him back to the stable master, regardless of their former kinship. If he had taught the hounds anything, it was to be loyal to the crown. It seemed he had been a good teacher, but a terrible practician of such loyalty.

Impa skidded around a corner and sprinted down yet another hall, ascending a small, spiral staircase. The lush, vivid colors of the livable spaces of the castle—the tapestries, the carpets, decorative paintings and suits of armor, disappeared as they ascended to the more practical parts of the building. A thick, lovely smell of what must've been some sort of meat stew met Link's nostrils, and despite his current situation, he couldn't help himself from grasping at his rumbling stomach. Pervasive dilutions of steam and smoke hung at the top of the hallway, and the smell grew stronger. The stones around him seemed to warm with the proximity of stoves, fires and activity.

He thought perhaps they would make their break for freedom straight through the kitchen, mowing down surprised servants, tripping over stacks of food, but Impa skidded to a halt before a pair of cracked oak doors, peering inside before dragging the two of them aside. She seemed to want to circumvent the kitchens, and considering their status as escapees, Link couldn't blame her. He could smell the heat in those rooms, almost feel the vibrations of feet on the floor and the harsh plunk of knives on wood. It would undoubtedly be a convenient way to get caught.

So they stuck to the perimeter of the tower, slinking through the lesser-used hallways, following Impa's lead. Link didn't know how long they had been on the run—it seemed like hours, but he could attribute the time dilation to the furious acceleration of his heart and the panic pouring through his veins.

After they bypassed the kitchens, Impa slowed. She looked back at the both of them, making sure they were still holding tight to one another. She almost smiled—Link could see a ghost of hope in the way the edges of her lips curled. He knew by the look in her eyes that they were close to escape, and he felt his heart slow a little.

Suddenly Impa's smile disappeared and she whipped her head around, foot sliding back, raising her fists. Link followed her gaze and saw, standing at the far end of the hall, a messy-haired kitchen boy, staring at them, mouth agape. His trembling arms held a massive pile of pans and utensils, his white coat stained with smears of red and brown. His brown eyes widened, and he dropped his burden. Link could feel the floor shake as the utensils scattered, bouncing and rolling in every direction. With a panicked look, the boy left his supplies on the floor and began to run.

Impa gave them one last frustrated look and ran after him, stopping at the end of the hall only to call something back to the yellow-haired girl. Link could not make out her words, but evidently the girl understood, since she grabbed Link's wrist and started sprinting down the hall, back where they came. Link managed to catch a glimpse over his shoulder, and saw Impa rush down to pick up a discarded butcher knife before chasing after the boy.

He hoped fervently she wouldn't kill him, but he knew better than to rely on that hope. He wondered if he should go back and stop her, but the girl held tightly to him. She seemed to trust Impa, and she didn't look back as she rushed Link down the hall, hurried and purposeful. He wondered what the woman had said to her to make her so suddenly determined. Perhaps she was just better at hiding her panic than he was.

Regardless of her resolute gait, the angry look of purpose on her face, Link could tell she knew as little about where they were going as he did. But she seemed to follow her feet almost instinctively, and he had no other choice but to trust her. He might know for a fact that they were lost, but he also knew surety when he saw it. This girl was following her gut, the same way he had followed his when he first met her under her colorful, shining window.

He trailed behind her as she ran opposite the kitchens, avoiding the heat and smell. He didn't know if Impa would catch up or when, but he let her drag him, faster and faster, up the halls and stairs of the southeastern wing of the palace.

She flung herself down a corridor, sprinting, somehow even more determined than when she started running. There was a strange glow in her eyes, a certain way her hand clenched around his that almost unnerved him. She had become different, miraculously different, just in these past few minutes, running in what he perceived to be circles. But she, evidently, could not concede to herself that their wandering was pointless. She suddenly knew where she was going.

But she was not stealthy like Impa. She did not have the uncanny senses, the quickness, the slight of hand or the preparedness. When she tore around a corner and skidded to a halt, Link nearly bowling her over, he looked to the end of the hall and saw four armed guards, all in formation.

It was almost in slow motion that they turned. Link could see every ripple of their capes, every glint of their armor, and when one of them started toward them, hand on the hilt of his sword, Link recognized the silver robe, the intricate designs on his breast plate, the near-white, long hair that fell from the bottom of his helmet across his shoulders. This man had seen Link before, driven his foot into his shoulder little more than a week ago. And judging by the way he sprang forward, drawing his sword, he was not delighted to see him again.

The yellow-haired girl whipped around, dress twirling about her, lace bouncing. She grabbed Link and they both sprinted down the hall, scrambling like mice. He didn't look behind him, at what he knew was the great silver knight, sword raised to cut him down. He just panted, desperately flailing, tumbling after the girl.

He did not know how long they ran. With each corner they turned, with each hall they sprinted down, Link was more and more sure that the knight was upon them, sword raised, ready to thrust down, end their lives. He skidded along the smooth stone of the hall, feet slipping, arms swinging, until the yellow-haired girl twisted herself sharply and pulled him into the safety between two pillars. A thick purple tapestry hung between the large columns of stone, and they slipped behind it.

The girl pushed him against the wall, and pulled a few inches of the tapestry aside to see the state of their pursuers. She whipped her head back into the shadows, let the tapestry fall, and pressed up against the stone. She slid along, pulling him with her, hands probing the cracks. Suddenly she stopped. She grabbed his hand and thrust it against the wall, pushing it along the stone. He almost pulled away merely out of instinct, but she held him against the hard surface. He felt every crack and crevice under his fingers, though few, and the stone did not feel odd to him, until she pushed his hand a little farther.

It seemed the whole wall opened up, just a bit. Not big enough for a grown, armored man to fit through, but either by accident, deliberate destruction or architectural design, the wall ended abruptly into a thin passage. The girl, in the dim light behind the tapestry, nodded to him once before slipping inside.

She turned sideways and squeezed through without trouble, gathering her dress about her and pulling it tight around her legs. Link tried to wedge himself in behind her, but he couldn't fit his shoulders. He pushed uselessly against the stone, reaching out to let her know he was behind her, when suddenly harsh light filled his vision. He whirled his head around, eyes wide, and saw the tapestry fly away, the gray, cloud-lit light of the hallway glowing bright and cold behind the figures of the guards. The cloth flew up in a cascade of purple, and Link saw the glint of blades as each guard raised his sword.

He pushed as hard as he could into the crack, releasing all the air in his lungs. He felt the girl's arm on his, pulling him into the safety of the stone. He felt the walls close around him, the cold firmness of rock push into his back. He saw the slow—eerily slow—descent of blades, glowing white with the sunlight that filtered through the windows.

But the girl pulled him through, stone scraping his skin, ripping his clothes, and he popped out the other side of the crack before the guards ran him through. He almost rolled out the other side of the crevice, panting, heart thumping against his ribcage. He lifted his hand to his chest and took a deep breath as the girl supported him, raising him from the floor. He looked into her eyes for a moment, reveling in relief. She smiled slightly at him, and lifted her gaze. He watched the wet sphere of her iris brighten, and could see a strange shape reflect in them, something glowing—golden, almost.

He turned around, following her gaze. He did not know what he saw then, but it nearly forced him back down to his knees. The yellow-haired girl stepped toward it, eyes wide, white hand reaching out to it. Link scrambled to grab her other hand, tried to pull her away—something that strange was certainly not to be touched, he was sure. But the girl kept walking toward it, undeterred by his protests. She reached out to the golden light, looking straight into its depths with an eternal fearlessness that Link could neither understand nor emulate.

Link could not look into the strange object's light as she could; in fact, he could barely raise his eyes to it at all. He did not know what it was, but he did know that this—this thing, whatever it was—was the reason the King, and no one else, was the King. From what he could make out between his teary eyelids, it sat on a pedestal, light tapering as it rose from its wide bottom, ending in a bizarre, delicate tip. He couldn't make out the size of the thing, it was enveloped in such radiance. All he knew was that it was mysterious, it emanated power, and his friend was recklessly walking toward it, arm outstretched. When he grabbed her wrist and tried to keep her from that strange power, she just wiggled out of his grip. Her eyes were wide, her gait slow and deliberate—it was as if this strange light had possessed her, forced her to stare deep into it while Link could barely glance at it.

He couldn't stop her. Her long, white fingers stretched out toward the bright triangular haze, and she leaned forward, mouth agape. But before her skin could brush against the strange golden object, before she could fall into the haze and let it consume her completely, the door on the other side of the room burst open and in sprinted half a dozen armed guards.


	7. The King's Palace

"Goddesses grant me the power to fulfill my needs, and the courage to chase my desires. But most of all, grant me the wisdom to tell one from the other."

Common Hyrulean Prayer

* * *

The ineffable golden light held the girl's gaze so tightly, not even the flurry of danger in her peripheral vision could tear her away from its glow. Capes flinging, swords glinting, the guards advanced, and fear twisted in Link's stomach. He grabbed the girl's wrist and shook her, harder than he imagined he could, screaming in his head and hoping that she might receive the message he sent to her through his desperate grasp. _Danger, danger is coming._

With a violent tug on her arm, he finally wrested the girl from the gravity of the strange golden entity. She retracted her white hand, eyes flicking back to Link, and he urged her away, to the other end of the room opposite the approaching guards.

Link knew better than to lead her back through the crack from which they emerged. If the guards knew where the crack opened up, they'd have a few men waiting on the other side for them. So he dragged her toward the only window, the only possible escape he saw, the vibrations of armored boots against the floor trembling up his back and sending shivers through him.

The window arched before them, stained with blues and greens and golds, tall and thin. Link briefly harbored a terrifying image of them bursting through it, flying gloriously into the sunlight only to fall to their deaths, and his legs went weak. He skidded to a halt before the large window, turning to see if their pursuers had caught up. The men seemed to be running toward them in slow motion, capes billowing in the golden light, and Link started to panic.

The girl, free from the trance of the golden light, reached over to him and pulled at his arm, pointing to one corner of the window, between the decorative stretch of stained glass and the black, featureless stone. There seemed to be some sort of latch, some small area of window independent of the rest, lined in thick tar and polished wood. It might've been installed so a servant could climb out and clean the shining panes of glass—but Link did not have much time to muse on the origins of the small passage. He just pulled out the latch, pushed open the window, and, after checking to make sure there was an outcropping of stone to catch him, jumped out.

His heart leapt into his throat as the castle grounds spread out before him, almost infinite. The shadows of evergreens and the snaking blue of pools lay concealed under a semi-opaque haze of distance. Air rushed past his face, up his nose, and for a moment he was sure he'd just keep falling, falling past all the floors of the black tower, forever.

He was almost surprised when his feet touched solid stone. He landed on a wide carving of some sort of monstrous creature, snarling and leaning over the empty air. He stumbled for a moment, drawing in sharp breath, half expecting to tumble down the side of the tower, flailing past black stone and long windows and shattering himself on the grounds below. He quelled the nausea rising in his gut and looked back up to the window, where the girl jumped after him, skirts billowing, golden hair flying in the wind. He reached out his arms, clumsily catching her in a wrinkled bunch of cloth and lace. He stumbled for a moment, directing himself to the wall, where he steadied the both of them. He let her down, her feet touching the monster's stone head, arms shaking. Above them, a ray of metallic light glinted, and an armored head poked out after them. The guard thrust his arm through the window, pauldrons catching on the frame.

Link didn't waste any time finding out whether the guard could fit himself through the maintenance window. He just grabbed the girl and tiptoed across the monster's outstretched wing, hugging the wall.

He tried to tell himself not to look down, but he couldn't stop himself. The palace grounds stretched out under him, yellowed with turning leaves. The wide, deep moat arced along the edges of the castle grounds, a curl of dark water. Far beyond him, to the east, shadowy forests dotted foothills before giant, bare mountains, blue in the distant haze. The sky itself seemed endless—he'd never been so high up on anything before, and with the nausea and fear came the ineluctable realization of his own smallness, the awe of the astounding vastness of all the King's land.

The most glorious sight of all, he realized with little surprise, was the King's palace itself. The biggest and most magnificent of the wings stood tall in the north: thousands of windows, hundreds of doors and balconies, silver columns against black stone, beautiful arches, tile roofing sloping up toward the sky. He stared at it for a long, wonderful moment, admiring its complexity and size, before returning to his own plight.

Link and the girl crept carefully, slowly, against this marvelous backdrop of hills and castle, holding onto each other and the wall for balance. A few dozen yards ahead, Link could make out where the statues ended and a thin, straight ledge of stone began. He pressed onward, holding onto the girl for dear life, as they sidled along the high ornamentation of the tower. He focused on putting one foot in front of the other, desperately trying not to slip off the stone and into the empty air below. The harsh, cold wind ran through his hair and dried the already chilly sweat on his face. The girl in front of him occasionally reserved one hand for keeping her skirts from flying upward. It confused Link to see her waste one good gripping hand on modesty alone, but he kept her steady, her hair flying into his face and mouth, whipping his skin like sharp pins. They struggled on, slowly, sliding their feet along the stone, pressing themselves against the walls, occasionally stopping to catch their breath.

They reached the bat-like wingtip of the stone monster, and stepped out onto a thin ledge. Link eyed the wall, but could see no way back into the building—just shining black stone. At the corner of the ledge, scraggly tendrils of ivy clung to the wall, small leaves fluttering in the wind. Link leaned over, slowly lowering himself to his knees, and examined the plants, so expertly gripping the ledge. He knew for a fact these vines knew much more about climbing than he did. He could trust them.

He looked back at the girl and nodded. She clenched her hands together at her chest, eyes wide, hair flying in the wind. She stumbled forward, mouth opening, when Link swung his legs over the ledge. His own heart skipped a few beats as his feet struggled through the empty air, but his toes managed to find a secure place among the leaves and branches of the creeper, and he started lowering himself. The girl crawled to the edge of the stone shelf, looking down at him with disbelief. He gripped a thick vine with one hand and motioned with the other for her to follow him. She shook her head, and he gestured more emphatically, bouncing on the vines to show their strength. She swallowed—he could almost see the fearful lump in her throat move down the smooth skin of her neck, but she followed him anyway. She carefully climbed down after him, arms shaking, dress flying in the wind. He climbed to the side, waiting for her to lower herself to his level. When she had clambered down shoulder-to-shoulder with him, he prodded her to make sure she was all right. Her narrowed, teary eyes glanced fearfully at him, but she nodded, and descended beside him, still trembling.

Occasionally, when her foot would slip or her sweaty palms would slide off a vine, he would reach out with one hand, steadying her on the small of her back, or gripping her wrist in case the rest of her slipped off into the air. Slowly, carefully, they made their down the wall of vines, and eventually Link's feet touched stone. He helped the girl down beside him, both of them still shaking with effort and fear. Link looked back up, at the expanse of vines that shuddered above him, and marveled at how far they had come.

They found themselves on a ledge much like the previous one, but far at the other side, past yards of bare, black wall, the stone flared out, mercifully wide—it almost looked like a platform. Link squinted, realizing that what he saw ahead of him was a battlement, and an opportunity for escape. He knew it would be dangerous to reenter the castle, but the alternative, jumping to the ground from this height, was out of the question. So he prodded the girl along the thin ledge, heart pounding furiously, eyes watering against the wind. They crawled along for what seemed like an eternity, until finally the girl's boots hit the solid stone of the battlement. She jumped off the parapet, landing on the safe, wide passage along the wall, and he nearly collapsed with relief when he tumbled to a halt beside her.

He had no time for rest, no time for celebration. As much as he wanted to linger, catch his breath and wipe the cold sweat off his brow, he forced himself to stand, helping the girl up beside him. He looked back at the tower, at the winged, stone creatures, the expanse of vines, and the long ledge from which they had jumped, then moved his gaze along the expansive battlement. It connected the southeastern tower to the main body of the palace, curving along the moat, dotted with cannons and arrow slits. He walked to the exterior parapet and leaned out over the water. He knew it would be a monumental risk, but jumping into the safety of the water might afford them the only chance they had for escape. He looked over at the girl and nodded, and she seemed to get his suggestion. Her eyes went wide and she covered her mouth, but after a moment of frantic consideration, she nodded back.

Link knew they stood a better chance if they got a little closer to the water, so he ran along the battlement, checking here and there for stairs, a lower outcropping of the building, anything to make sure the fall would not end fatally. After a few minutes of running, they came across a lookout post comprised of a small tower and a platform jutting out over the black water. It might not be their best shot, but if they jumped off the tip, they could avoid hitting the jagged rocks on either side of the deep moat.

Link hoped the girl could swim, since he could not. Either she would have to keep him afloat or he would have to learn, fast. He gulped and gazed down over the water, biting his lip, hesitating.

The girl grabbed his arm and shook it. He glanced up at her and saw her pointing furiously behind him. He turned, and his heart twisted inside of him. On the interior end of the battlement, not forty paces from where they stood, appeared a company of guards: the swordsmen they had previously outrun, six or seven archers, and the large, silver-armored general at the forefront. The archers, swift and easy, pulled arrows from their quivers and nocked them, drawing the bowstrings back to their shadowy, narrow-slitted helmets. Link stared at the glinting tips of their arrows before raising his eyes to the general. He barely had time to make out the slow rise of his hand, the movement of his chin under his helmet, as he commanded the guards to fire.

Standing like a target at the parapets, Link uselessly raised his arms against the barrage of arrows. Time seemed to slow, and he saw each thin sliver of wood fly through the grey sky toward him. He felt the sharp wind follow the shafts, panic rising in his veins. An arrow landed at his feet, ricocheting off the stone with a puff of dust. Another flew past his ear, lost forever in the air behind him. Yet another barely missed his arm, ruffling the green cloth of his tattered shirt.

He backed up, panicking, and something thumped into his chest. His eyes widened, his breathing stopped, and his foot instinctively slid back, trying to keep his body steady. In the window of slowed time his own terror afforded him, he dared to look down at himself. A long black shaft protruded from his ripped shirt, brown fletching quivering in the wind. For a horrifying moment, he could not distinguish where he ended and the arrow began; the wooden shaft, slender and almost curved, seemed an inextricable part of him.

He lost all feeling in his chest for a moment, and raised his hand to the base of the arrow jutting from below his right collarbone. He had to feel the wood beneath his fingertips, he had to make sure the shaft was real, before the wave of pain actually arrived. His head swirled, his vision blurred, and he stumbled back, bracing himself against the agony that spread from his chest outward. He wavered, blood running down his skin, and twisted his body, looking over at the girl.

She stared at him, eyes wide, mouth agape. Her already pale face had drained of all remaining color, and he saw her reach out for him, slowly, painfully slowly, panic spreading across her features. He almost reached back, almost touched his fingers to hers, as he lost his balance. He fell too slowly, tripping backward over the parapet, hovering in midair, timeless.

The only thing in focus was her face, her beautiful, narrow face, showing such concern, such bewilderment at his injury. He marveled at it, blind to his own pain, for a long, wonderful second, shafts of arrows flying between them, until one of the thin bolts disappeared into the soft white skin of her neck.

Fear erupted in Link's stomach and he shivered, extending his arm to her. She blinked, a sphere of blood emerging at the corner of her open mouth, dainty as a raindrop. She raised her hands to her neck, grasping at the arrow, but before she could wrap her fingers around the dark wood, blood began to pour from her wound, running down her front, staining the lace of her dress. Her eyes, wide with panic, darted to his and she stared at him as she fell after him over the parapet, dress flapping in the wind.

She left a vertical trail of blood in her wake as she soared over the water, neck limp, legs splayed. The droplets gathered like constellations as she fell, spurting from her wound, floating, or so it seemed, motionless in the air. Her eyes glazed, her hands limply thrown above her, she twisted downward alongside him. He tried to grab her hand, to touch her bloodied fingertips with his own, but he couldn't reach. They each tumbled toward the moat, hopelessly alone, bleeding into the uncaring air.

Then, after an eon of falling, of twisting and panicking and wishing fervently to survive, Link hit the black water.


	8. Palo

"It is habit among the poorer townsfolk of the Capital to scavenge the palace's outer grounds in the vain hope that something of value will appear. They can often be found sitting at the edge of the moat, looking for treasures that may bob to the surface. But the palace logistics are anything but wasteful—no food is spared, no materials squandered; the palace's ministers are masters of funds. What items may happen to appear at the surface of the moat are undoubtedly scraps—mere trash. Still, that does not deter the people. The more frugal of them operate under the old adage of one man's trash being another's treasure, and with the correct attitude and a modicum of creativity, I suppose it is true."

Samuel Red, _Common Life under Dragmire Rule_

* * *

When Impa helped Palo pull the bodies of the boy and girl from the moat, hidden under the arc of the sturdy drawbridge, she couldn't hide her abject shame. It was if her own life had left her as permanently as it had the young corpses floating in the water. She struggled to breathe, but not with the effort of hauling the dead weight onto the black rocks.

"You did all you could," Palo said morosely, dragging the pale, limp body of the teenaged girl from the cold water and laying her on her side. Her eyes, wide and lifeless, stared meaninglessly into the darkness until Palo closed them, brushing his fingers down the wan, cold skin of her eyelids. Impa couldn't stand to look into the girl's face, couldn't stomach the arrow that still protruded from her neck, washed clean of blood. She focused on retrieving the boy, equally limp, pierced below the collarbone with a similar arrow.

"Palo." She forced herself to speak, voice cracking with regret. "See if she's out there, over the moat."

The man narrowed his eyes at her, and she could just make out the flattened outlines of the two dark red tattoos over his eyelids. "What would be the point, Impa? She's of no use to us dead."

"Just do it," she insisted. She tugged the boy's body out of the water and he collapsed inertly onto the stones.

Palo sighed and closed his eyes, revealing the full width of the lenses of truth that colored the skin on his lids. His mouth contorted; he pressed his lips together, as he always did when searching for a recent death. He remained stoic and vigilant for a few minutes, red tattoos scanning the water just as real eyes would. When he opened them again, it was with a defeated frown. "She's not here."

Impa sighed, lifting the boy from the rocks and examining him. "Palo… this one is still alive."

Palo frowned angrily. "Oh, well good. We can keep him as a pet, then." When Impa shot him a disdainful look, he saw fit to continue: "You need to learn to cork your bleeding heart. We can't afford to have a useless tag-along. He would only be a burden."

"I don't think he'll be useless."

"What tells you that?"

"I just feel it."

Palo shook his head, bending down to look at the pale, barely-breathing boy, arrow sticking up from his chest like a triumphant flagpole. "Look, Impa. If that came from your grandmother, I'd believe it. But you aren't her." Palo glanced up into the shadows of the drawbridge above him. "Besides, the guards will be searching for two bodies."

"But they don't care about his. He's nothing but a palace slave. Look." Impa tugged the cloth of his soaked shirt below his left shoulder, revealing an intricate black mark. "They won't spare more than a second to search for him. They might not even notice him gone."

Palo shook his head. "Why are you so insistent?"

Impa stood, pulling the limp boy off the wet rocks and into her arms. He shifted slightly, a moribund shudder coursing through him. She gave Palo a determined look—one that he'd seen a hundred times before. She did not need to open her mouth before he acquiesced.

"Fine." Palo crossed his arms and nodded to the girl. "I suppose we ought to leave her here." He looked down at the pale, limp corpse and his face fell. "Gods forgive us."

"It's not the gods' forgiveness we need," Impa answered, "It's the elder's." She drew the boy tighter to her, and felt his heat seeping into the air with each passing moment. He didn't have much time. "I have to get him to Balras. Give us a disguise."

Palo twisted his arm and shoulder, pulling his cloak off with one graceful motion. He threw it around Impa, and as she felt the warmth of the cloth fall around her, she also recognized the tingling, heavy feeling of deceptive magic. The cape fluttered to a still slope around her shoulders, concealing herself and the injured boy in her arms. She turned him so even the arrow that stuck from his breast lay beneath the cloak and its protective spell, and he groaned a little in pain.

"That should hold until you get back to the good doctor's," Palo said. "No doubt the guards will be here to look for her corpse shortly. I'll distract them for a while."

"Thank you," Impa sighed. She looked briefly at herself in the waters of the moat and saw an old, wrinkled hunchback staring back, bent over with effort and the extra weight of her large hump. It was only halfway decent, but it would have to do. Disguising two people at once took time and energy—both luxuries that they did not have at the moment.

"Good luck," Palo said, before giving her a traditional Sheikah salute. He smiled and leapt up the steep slope of jagged rocks, away from the water. He flung himself into full view of the palace lookouts, leading their shouts and gazes away from Impa and the dying boy. Palo swept along the crest of the rocks surrounding the moat, soaring through the air, dancing on the tips of stones. Impa resigned herself to no such freedom of movement—after all, she was an old, frail woman with a debilitating deformity. She said a quick prayer over the girl's corpse, trying to keep her heart from shriveling up completely, and turned, ascending the rocks slowly and carefully back to the shadows of the city.

It felt like a terrible betrayal, leaving the girl there like that, cold and unmourned. Impa knew her parents were already dead, and she had no siblings, no cousins, no aunts or uncles—at least, on the correct side of the family. No, she had been the last of her kind, their last hope. And now Impa had to resign herself to leaving her corpse to rot by the moat, carrying instead a living deaf boy, no more than a slave.

Why did you have to live where she died? she said silently to the young man limp in her arms. It would've been better if you had taken the arrow for her.

Impa knew her unwelcome, bitter thoughts would not help her now. She knew she should let them go, let the frustration slide past her harmlessly, deflected by her strength. It wasn't like her to dwell on the past, to live in regret. According to the teachings of her elders, it wasn't like any Sheikah. But what they failed to account for was the Hylian blood diluting her own, bringing on unforgivable lapses in her training. She was sure it was her own muddied lineage that broke the tight hold she had on her own mind and allowed her thoughts to wander; she was sure it was what kept her from inheriting her grandmother's gift. It undermined her, misled her, and if she could wash away all the blood inside her that was not an asset, she would waste no time drawing it and letting it flow. She would gladly destroy the parts of her that held her back—if she knew how.

But she didn't. She was a failure in nearly every respect. She could not suppress the taint in her blood, she couldn't gaze into the future. She had allowed herself to get distracted, she had lost track of her ward, she had let their only hope die, flying off the battlements of the king's palace with an arrow in her throat.

 _Princess, oh princess, I'm so sorry,_ Impa said to herself, struggling up the rocks, slipping between two dilapidated buildings and leaning against the wall. _That's the worst part—you never knew. You never knew your station, your duty, you never knew your own power._

And now Impa would return to Doctor Balras with not the scion of the royal family in hand, but a gravely wounded stableboy, unimportant, unwanted. She didn't know why she was taking the time to save this young man; he was so pale, so fragile-looking with his white skin and soft features, she was unsure if he would even live long enough to make it to the doctor's. She supposed it was because the stableboy had sought her out. They already seemed to be destined to run into one another; an inexplicable voice in her head told her she had some sort of responsibility to keep him alive.

She hugged him closer to her and leaned out from her hiding place, looking over the moat. She saw the black, thin shape of Palo, dancing past guards, arrows flying over his head. He twisted his body, evading the soldiers almost playfully. He probably knew Impa had long since left the drawbridge—it wasn't unlike Palo to endanger himself for the sake of a little fun. She shook her head and tore herself away from the spectacle of silhouettes across the water, spears and swords glinting.

She turned toward the city, making her way slowly, with a distinct limp, weighed down by what passersby would attribute as a hideous deformity. She slipped past uninterested townsfolk, feet heavy, hunched over. She pushed onward, past the near-palace districts into the slums, thankful that the most attention anyone paid her was nothing more than a disgusted glance. She easily stumbled from shadow to shadow, occasionally looking down at the boy in her arms. He shivered, his eyelids fluttered, but mercifully, he did not wake.

He was by no means a light burden. He was a solid lad, well-built, not too scrawny. His legs were long, his shoulders wide, and he was certainly no longer a slight child, easy to carry and conceal. If he was not officially a man yet, he was certainly close, and he weighed like it.

Still, Impa carried him, struggling along at a distressingly slow pace. She feared he would die before she arrived at Balras' door, but she kept walking through the filthy, crumbling disasters of the poor districts, where the cobblestone made way for mud. Squalid, leaning brick apartments, smelling of decay and poverty, stood against the grey sky. It was in front of one of these buildings that she stopped, and only after checking her surroundings to make sure she was not followed, reached out a gnarled old hand and knocked.

By the time the door opened, her disguise had worn off, and she stumbled into the building, cloak flinging from her back in a brown ripple. Doctor Balras made way for her, swearing at the sight of the boy she brought with her.

"What in all the goddesses' names have you done?" he asked. She just stumbled across the room, almost tripping over the doctor's petulant grey house cat, and threw the boy on the sullied mattress under the cracked window. The doctor saw to all of his patients on that ratty thing—his apartment wasn't the most desirable milieu for surgical procedures, but he served the poorest people of the city practically for free, so he didn't exactly have money to spend on upmarket medical supplies.

The doctor walked up to Impa and looked at the young man. "I was expecting a princess, Impa. What is this you've given me?"

Impa couldn't help but hang her head. "Balras, forgive me. She's dead."

The doctor's eyes widened, and his mouth twitched before his eyebrows drew together and he sighed. "Well then, I suppose we had better focus on treating the one who's still alive."

Impa had expected rage. She had expected disappointment, distress, a lengthy reprimand for her unforgivable incompetence. She had prepared herself to swallow whatever words Balras had for her, whatever shame he could cast over her with his words and glances. But he only turned to his new patient, leaning over the boy, frowning. His calm silence, his unexpected acceptance of defeat, almost shook Impa more than an angry rebuke could.

She just stood in stunned silence as Balras prodded the boy's wounds, lips wiggling in thought. He lifted his eyes to Impa and frowned widely. "He's lucky. Very lucky." His words tore her out of her state of shock and replaced it with a relief she could not explain. "But we need to hurry. I'm going to need you to hold him down while I extract the shaft."

Impa did as the doctor instructed, leaning with all her weight onto the young man's shoulder as the doctor gripped the arrow. With more than one tug, and more than one half-conscious cry from the boy, the shaft came free, smooth steel arrowhead still attached. "He's lucky this wasn't barbed. Goddess help him if that were the case."

With the removal of the arrow came the release of a torrent of blood from the puncture. It ran down into the boy's armpit, staining the mattress below him. The doctor instructed Impa to press gauze over the open wound as he went to his glass cupboard and pulled out vials and jars, dried leaves and crushed roots. He placed them at his table while Impa stemmed the bleeding, watching the boy's eyes for any sign of regaining consciousness. He remained mercifully unaware as the doctor mixed his ingredients in a blue-tinted jar, waiting for it to settle.

"This is a disinfectant of your father's invention, did you know?" he asked, looking over his shoulder at her, spectacles shining.

"Yes, I did. I can recognize the smell."

"Ah, of course." The doctor picked up the jar, pulling a white cloth from the cupboard and sat down beside her. "Did he ever teach you the tricks of his trade?"

"Quite a bit, actually," Impa answered.

"Well, why am I doing all the work, then? I should be making you do it!" He laughed, motioned for her to lift the gauze, and he poured a generous portion of the medicine onto the wound. The boy hissed, twitching his arm, gritting his teeth, but he didn't open his eyes.

The doctor garnished the wound with a sprinkling of red leaves—leaves Impa recognized as a potent anti-inflammatory—before wrapping the boy's shoulder and arm in a long white bandage. "There. We've done all we can about that. Does he have any other wounds?"

"Let's find out," Impa said, drawing her knife and cutting off the rest of the boy's shirt.

At the sight of his brand, the doctor clicked his tongue, shaking his head. "Is this the stableboy who'd been following you around?"

"Who told you he was following me?"

"Palo did. He said you had a little Hylian admirer."

Impa couldn't stop the childish heat from rushing to her face. She didn't need the doctor to know all the small, inconsequential details of her reconnaissance—it made her look nothing less than amateurish, to have a young man follow her around when she was supposed to be doing the stalking. "That's the last time I divulge any details to Palo," she muttered.

"Do not worry yourself, Impa. We are your allies, there is no harm in us knowing a thing or two about the odd things you encounter during your missions." The doctor lay his hands gently on the boy's wounded shoulder and he twitched in his sleep, but otherwise seemed all right.

Impa looked down at his pale face, blond eyebrows drawn together in soporific pain. "I had intended to lose him and forget about him," she admitted. "I don't know if Palo had informed you of this… but he was the one who got the princess to emerge from her hiding place. Every day she would open her window to wave down at him. It was his coaxing that let me look at her long and hard enough to know she was the one."

"And how did he end up here with us, and not her?"

Impa sighed. "After the palace guards came for her father, he found the carnage. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When I persuaded the soldiers to… escort me to the palace prison, they happened to throw me into a cell with him. There was something about him—something desperate. At first I thought I would just help him escape. I knew he had nothing to do with all this; he's just the stableboy. And a deaf one at that."

"Deaf, hmm." The doctor lifted the young man's shirt, examining the scrapes and bruises along his torso. Seeing nothing of seriousness, he replaced the cloth and focused on tugging off his soggy boots.

"He was with me when I found the princess. Shortly after that we were separated… a kitchen boy saw us, so I had to dispose of him. I told the princess to hide, but when I got back to where I'd left them, they had disappeared."

The doctor grunted, looking over the stableboy's feet. "He's got a badly sprained ankle, but nothing serious. The medicine I gave him should take care of that. Continue."

"I thought… we were in the southeast tower, Balras. I knew that she had heard the call of her birthright. So I tried to follow them there. I looked for a way to enter the tower, to see if she had indeed reclaimed the power she should've rightly been born with."

"Wouldn't that have been spectacular?" the doctor asked, tugging at the boy's pants and examining the purple bruises on his legs. "For you to have escaped the palace with that kind of power at your disposal?"

"It would've saved us a lot of time in the future," Impa admitted, leaning to help him remove the young man's wet breeches. She saw him shiver, and so replaced them with a blanket when the doctor confirmed he had no serious injuries below the waist. "I hoped, I really did, that she had found her way there. All I needed to do was retrieve her, then. The only way I could get up to the tower took me across the battlements, but by the time I got halfway there, they'd already…" Impa's chest tightened, her voice raspy and strained. "The guards shot them off the battlement and they fell into the moat. So I signaled to Palo. I ran as fast as I could to the drawbridge and down to the water. Luckily no one saw me."

"And that's where you found him?"

"Yes."

Balras cupped his chin thoughtfully, staring down at the twitching boy. "I still do not know why you decided to save him."

"Neither do I."

"Is it because… well, perhaps there is a chance he has some royal blood in him?"

Impa glanced down at the young man and bit her lip. He had the same eyes, the same pale skin, darker but still golden hair. But so did many Hylians. If somehow royal blood had made it into his veins, it was thin. "Doubtful. It's possible, but we had already confirmed the girl and her father were the only ones in the city with the royal lineage. Unless they're siblings, then chances are he's just a commoner."

"But there is a slim possibility." Impa didn't know if Balras' words were that of misplaced hope or something else. She could only give him a nod, and he sighed. "Well… I can't say for sure, but he'll probably be all right. The arrow was the worst of it, which is saying something. Sounds like he's been through a lot." Balras lay his hand on Impa's shoulder. "And so have you. You should get some rest."

Impa shook her head. "I'm fine, I should watch over him. At least until Palo gets back."

"Impa, I insist you go to bed." There was a sternness in Balras' eyes that she couldn't disregard. He did remind her of her father, just a bit. "I will take care of him until Palo returns."

Impa nodded. She hadn't realized how tired she was until Balras badgered her about it. She sighed, turning to his rickety stairs and hauling herself halfway up. The wood creaked beneath her boots, and she stopped, staring down at her feet. "I'm sorry, Balras," she said.

"Don't torment yourself over this, Impa," he answered. "Everything will turn out as it should."

 _As it should._ There was an admission of helplessness in that statement that unnerved Impa. She'd rather not leave everything to fate if she could help it. She just swallowed the lump in her throat and ascended the stairs, collapsing onto the straw-stuffed bed that awaited her in the doctor's room.

Despite her exhaustion, she could not force herself to sleep. When she closed her eyes, she saw the girl's corpse, forsaken on the rocks under the drawbridge. She saw her glazed eyes, more gray than blue, staring sightlessly, ringed with discolored flesh. Impa turned over, trying to avoid the young princess, but she was on either side of her, staring, arrow protruding from her throat like an accusation. No matter how Impa tried, she couldn't evade her failure, couldn't evade the fact that it was because of her their last hope had died. There was no escaping it: the royal line had been exterminated.


	9. The Curse

"When I was a young girl, my mother sat me down on her knee and said, 'Child, know this: there is nothing in this world which time and rest cannot cure.' She later died of consumption, wheezing, in her sleep. She always was a mercurial woman."

Errachella, Eldine Performer

* * *

"He should've woken up by now," Impa muttered, staring into the stableboy's pale, almost green face. "You said he was through the worst of it." She turned to Doctor Balras, his big brown eyes squinting past his round spectacles. He looked like some sort of bird, with his bright glasses and hooked nose, staring down curiously at the stableboy from the safety of his tree.

He lay a hand on the young man's forehead and sighed. "It appears he is not as well as I would've hoped."

Palo sat on the splintery table (used for both examinations and meals, since the doctor could only afford one), picking his teeth with his knife, flicking the debris from its blade. "Maybe he's just not meant to live."

Impa whipped her head around and shot him an accusatory look. Before she could upbraid him, the doctor pushed his spectacles farther up his nose and cleared his throat. "My theory is that the arrowhead introduced some sort of toxin into his blood."

"But palace guards don't poison their arrows," Impa said. "We've never seen them do it before."

"Maybe the policy has changed."

"Or, maybe," Palo said, sliding off the table and crossing his arms, "he's just _not meant to live_."

Impa narrowed her eyes at him, moving herself almost protectively between the boy and Palo. "Kind words from a man whose only friends are the dead."

"Hold your tongues, both of you," Balras said. "There is an explanation for his failure to recover that is not tied to fate. He is neither meant to live nor die. No one is. However, it is my duty to do what I can to help him."

Impa couldn't stop herself from thanking the man. Palo just shook his head, pulled himself back onto the table and resumed picking his teeth.

"I will take another look at him, Impa. For you." Balras smiled at her and she couldn't help turning her gaze to Palo, still smirking, still slowly shaking his head as if he knew something they did not.

* * *

Impa stood at the foggy window, staring out into the street, through the whitish haze of drizzle. She watched for suspicious passers-by, for any pair of eyes that stood out to her as malicious. But things seemed peaceful. The palace's soldiers hadn't followed them to this muddy, dilapidated district, and it appeared no one residing on this street harbored any intention of turning them in. They were alone, unwatched.

It did not strike Impa as unusual that the palace would not miss a servant enough to send the guards out after him. It did, however, seem odd that the guards would have no interest in tracking down the two Sheikah invaders that had raided the King's palace and caused such an uproar. Since she returned to the doctor, she had heard more than a few stories as she made her scouting rounds, passed from mouth to mouth, from peasants to professionals, from soldiers to seamstresses, that two spies had infiltrated the palace in an attempt to assassinate the King. Variations on this narrative were as diverse as they were ludicrous—the two intruders had both been taken out and their bodies recovered from the moat; the King himself had put them to death with his own broadsword; they had managed to kidnap a magistrate's beautiful daughter; they were not intruders at all, but royal ghosts who had wandered north from Oldcastle, out to avenge the rulers of those crumbled ruins.

Impa shook her head at the window, filing through the stories in her head. It was just as well—whatever lies people spoke among themselves only served to conceal them from the sniffing noses of the King and his hounds. Consensus among the people was that the intruders had been killed quickly, without mercy. No one was looking for two Sheikah and a deaf stableboy in this neighborhood.

So she decided she could afford the luxury of music. If someone heard the light, benign plucking of her harp beyond the moldy brick walls, they would think nothing of it. She needed to feel the strings under her fingers, needed to relieve that aching stress in her stomach, and let her worry dissipate into the air with the fading melodies.

She retrieved her old harp from the doctor's closet, brushing the dust off its soundboard and twisting the pegs. She coaxed out a few songs from the old strings and let the music fill her, fill the air. She felt her breath slow, her heart beat steadily with the music, and sighed with relief.

She glanced over at the sleeping stableboy, sweating profusely, twitching in pain, and wondered if the subtle vibrations of her notes could reach him, deep in his fretful sleep. When she plucked out a final, fading arpeggio and lowered her harp, she couldn't help herself from wandering over to his side. She stared down into his closed eyes, wondering what he saw in his sleep behind them.

"You're being unusually solicitous around him, Impa." Palo's voice destroyed her meticulously crafted post-music silence, and she turned to see him leaning against the creaking, peeling doorway. "Then again, you always did have a thing for boys who look like girls."

Impa ignored Palo's snide remark. She set the harp down and sat by the boy's side, staring at his motionless face, looking for signs of him waking, or dying. The doctor's house cat, a normally antisocial (if not downright antagonistic) animal, crawled onto the foot of his mattress, purring, patchy gray tail flicking contentedly. Impa could not sit too close to the little bastard, and even Palo, who feared nothing, kept his distance.

She sighed. "I don't understand. Balras says his wounds are clean, but he's not getting any better."

"Maybe he hit his head on the way down into the moat," Palo suggested, before crossing his arms and sighing. "Look. I understand you regret the failure of this mission. I'm at fault as well. But we cannot save everyone we see crushed under the heel of this regime." He stepped forward, laying a hand on Impa's shoulder. It was strangely warm. "Leave him, Impa. Let him die. We must get back to Kakariko. We have to let the elder know."

She bit her lip, letting her heavy eyelids flutter closed for a moment. She imagined looking through her lids, like her partner did, into the spaces between the shadows, where no other could see. She thought for a moment, carefully. "Palo, tell me if death is around him."

He was silent for a moment. "Sorry, Impa, I can only recognize it after the fact. If I could see death before it descended, everyone I love would be alive today."

Impa sighed. She lay her hand on the boy's forehead, his skin cold and clammy beneath hers. "Balras insists it's poison."

"Then it probably is."

"What would make the palace guards tip their arrows all of a sudden, though?" Impa said. "And if it is poison, it's slow—incredibly so. Too slow to be useful on a battlefield."

Palo narrowed his eyes. "Does it matter? All we know is that he's been getting worse. It's been this way for days. He's not—" The look Impa gave him forced his mouth shut, and he sat down beside her, well away from the belligerent house cat. He sighed, folding his hands contritely. "You're really that invested in him? Are you sure it's not just because you feel responsible for him?"

"I'm not sure of anything," she answered. "But I have a feeling. It's merely a slight echo of my grandmother's certainty, I admit. But it's there."

Impa and Palo turned when the doctor rattled at the front door. Palo pulled himself off the mattress and glanced back at her. "If you're mistaken, about any of this, there are dire consequences. If he's not really just a stableboy and is important to the King, when they find him here they're going to kill all of us. Just a warning." With that he waltzed to the front door and opened it for the doctor, wearing a wide, welcoming grin.

* * *

Darkness fell again, heavily, with the rain. Impa listened to the pattering of drops on the doctor's tin roof, and stared at the flecks of light reflected in the broken windows. Balras and Palo stood over the sleeping stableboy, studying him.

"I've little doubt of it," Balras said. "It's poison."

The boy had only gotten worse the past few days. The doctor's gray cat, usually such a terror, had settled into the crook of his neck and clawed at anyone who dared touch the boy's green, clammy skin.

"So what are you going to do about it?" Impa asked.

"I have an acquaintance who specializes in venoms of plant and animal. He might be able to share with me some herbs that may help." The doctor shook his head, took one long look at the sleeping boy, and walked to the door. He grabbed his ratty coat from a rusted hook on the wall and donned it. "I can't believe I'm going to have to go beg my competitors for their assistance." He laughed, heartily, until the chuckles turned into coughs and he hunched over his hands, hacking. He flung the door open, still coughing, and disappeared into the rainy night.

"Something's wrong," Impa said, staring at the front door, still shuddering with the impact of the doctor's spirited slam.

"Of course there is," Palo replied. "We have a dying peasant on our hands and we don't even know why."

Impa shook her head. "It's not that. It's just…" She moved to the young man's side, standing in the flickering shadows of raindrops from the high window, and stared down at him. "It's not poison."

She could sense Palo stiffen behind her, she could almost feel the anxiety in the way he shifted his position. "You said that before."

Impa glanced at him over her shoulder. She knew he could see the accusation in her eyes, but she said nothing. She merely knelt beside the sleeping boy and pulled the covers down below his chest. His skin was clean, if not too wan, and there was no sign of a creeping infection. So she pinched the edge of his bandage in her fingers and pulled, slowly lifting his shoulder to unwrap it.

"Impa, how are you so sure it's not poison?"

She shook her head and continued undressing the wound, pulling loose the length of clean cloth. She made sure to look in the nooks of the boy's flesh as she went—examining the soft space around his ribs, the small tuft of hair under his armpit, the shadow of his collarbone. She came to the gauze and lifted it away, peeling back the bloodied strip of material, to reveal a clean, uninfected wound. The skin was a bit swollen, the puncture caked in dried blood, but there was no sign of poison, no sign of any obstacle to proper healing.

Impa knew then the boy's ailment was not medical in origin. Someone, at some time, had sabotaged his recovery. With a pang of despair, she realized Palo had plenty of opportunity to infect the boy with some curse or another. His comments replayed in her head, quickly, viciously, and she held her breath. It would've been easier, _better_ even, if the young man had died and saved them the trouble of caring for him, but she did not know if Palo had the resolve to stoop to such means. Then again, he always had a nonchalance regarding the topic of death…

She glanced back at him, and he just swung his legs, sitting on the table. He raised his eyebrows at her. "So?" he asked.

A shiver ran through Impa, and she bent back down to the boy, throwing the bandage aside and lifting his arm. She muttered a truth-seeing enchantment—one of the earliest any Sheikah learns—and leaned in. On the inside of his bicep, on a white, soft strip of flesh covered normally by the bandage, she could make out a mark, oblong but symmetrical, burnt into his skin. It was black, intricate, and, Impa realized with an unsurpassed rush of relief, not Sheikah in origin. She put the boy's arm down and looked back at Palo. A burning sense of guilt and shame enveloped her when she realized exactly how easily her trust in him had been shaken.

"This isn't yours?" she asked quietly.

"What? Of course not." Palo held his hand to his chest, mocking offense. "You said you believed he should live, so I'm not gonna kill him."

She pressed her fingers to the curse mark, and it hissed against her skin, hot and malicious. "Then it was Balras."

Palo sighed. "That's what I was afraid of."

"Can you remove it?" Impa turned the boy's arm so the mark faced upward, and Palo leaned over it, squinting. "If we work together we can take it off him."

"It _is_ pretty intricate," he admitted. "But we can do it. Considering the strength of that curse, it seems the kid's doing remarkably well. It's Balras I'm more worried about." He scratched the back of his head. "Now, why would he want to kill our useless little stableboy?"

Impa looked down at the tiny mark and its evil aura. "Perhaps it's because the good doctor knows more than we do about him. Or… well, he was quite adamant that there was a distinct possibility this boy has some royal blood in him. Personally, I don't see it. But if Balras has fallen in with the King or his ilk, he'd want to sever the old family's lines. All of them."

Palo leaned against the wall, cupping his chin. He closed his eyes, his tattoos dull and inactive. "Either way, we're due for a little talk."

Impa lay her finger again over the stableboy's curse mark, depressing his sweaty skin slightly. Palo moved beside her, placing his hand on top of hers. Her fingers twitched a little, a sharp energy moving through their flesh. Impa nodded to him, and they both drew long, deliberate breaths, narrowing their concentration to the mark.

When Impa was teaching her younger sister to remove curses, she described it as both a complicated and simple matter. It could be quick, if you were lucky, or arduous if you were not. The best analogy she could concoct at the time was that of untying a bundle of strings, sorting through knot after knot, grabbing one end of the line and following it through all the twists and turns and obstacles to its hidden end. There were as many ways to remove a curse as there were to unbundle a knot of string—the more wasteful, hasty and dangerous way would be to cut the curse right off, as one might cut the string into shorter bits to ease its disentanglement. Some magicians could navigate through the entire spell, move it slightly, and unravel it in one fell swoop, if they were skilled. But the most reliable way was to find a familiar rune, to start with the end of the string, and retrace it back through its knots and tangles.

If Palo hadn't been there to help her, she could've stayed at it for hours, trying to wrestle the boy from the snarl of the curse. As they usually did, Palo and Impa came to a tacit agreement, working together seamlessly without a word. Palo started at one end of the curse, Impa at the other, and they worked their way into the middle, unraveling it as they went. The boy twitched as they prodded him, drawing magic from his arm. His head rocked back and forth, a bead of sweat dripping down his white skin, and he twisted his body weakly, as if trying to escape from under their hands. But he didn't have the strength to give them any trouble, so within a few minutes they pulled the curse from his skin.

The tiny insignia hovered over Impa's hand, pulsating purple before disassociating into the air in a puff of dark smoke. Impa closed her fist over the empty air with a sigh of relief. She looked up at Palo, and he gave a slow nod of approval. The stableboy settled down with a sigh, some color returning to his pale skin.

The tiny, dingy apartment fell into an energetic silence. The young man was no longer groaning in his sleep, and the house cat had crawled away into the shadows, where it waited in silence for the return of its owner. The two Sheikah stood by their patient, watching the door for the first sign of Balras' entrance. Without an unnecessary word, they agreed that it was best to surprise the doctor after he had already returned inside, so they would not cause a ruckus in the street.

They rewrapped the boy and positioned him as inconspicuously as they could. Impa pulled the bandage tight across his wound, trying to replicate the doctor's skilled binding, while Palo bent down and tugged the blanket back up over his shoulders. After all was arranged to look as if nothing suspicious had taken place, they lounged in the shadows, waiting.

When the doctor did finally arrive, herbs in hand, he stopped in the doorway. "I'm sorry about the long wait," he said, clutching the herbs in one hand and shaking off his rain-drenched coat. "It was quite a walk…"

When the doctor turned, and saw the looks on his Sheikah companions' faces, noticed their eager stances, his eyes widened. They flitted from Palo, one hand reaching for his knife, to the stableboy, now healthier than ever, sleeping soundly on the ratty mattress, and finally settled on Impa.

Before Palo could draw his blade and pounce on Balras, the doctor threw the herbs in a storm of green and sprinted back through the door into the street. The door hung open behind him, squeaking on its hinges, heavy rain flying through the doorway onto the dirty floor. Palo made a move to chase Balras, but Impa grabbed his arm before he could make it out into the street.

"Remember, no commotions."

"Then what do you propose we do?" he asked, mouth contorted with frustration.

"We already had plans to sneak a girl out of the city, why not a boy instead?" She dropped Palo's arm and walked over to the sleeping stableboy, ignoring the rain that blew across the room through the open door. "Let Balras run. He'll inform his masters of our whereabouts and situation. Let him. We'll be gone before they arrive."

Palo shook his head. "We're cutting it close, Impa."

"Don't we always?" She dared to smile at him, and with saw with a wave of comfort that he grinned back.

"I'll get the cart ready. Same plan as before, just with a peasant rather than a princess."

Impa nodded. As Palo slipped out the door to go secure their means of smuggling the boy out of the city, she sighed and returned to the mattress. She leaned over the stableboy, eyeing him for any sign of waking. His body must've been exhausted, fighting off such a potent curse for so long. It was probably better that he be unconscious when they trotted through the city gates—at least then he wouldn't be able to accidentally expose them.

She supposed the young man wasn't too verbose to begin with. The only word she had heard from him was a stilted mispronunciation of her own name, and even then, he'd only said it out of necessity. No, the boy was not a talker.

She reached down and gathered him in her arms, grunting at his weight. She pulled him close against her, and his eyelids twitched with troubled dreams. She carried him to the door, glancing out into the heavy, dark rain of the moonless night before stepping out into the street.


	10. The Castle in the Distance

"What shall I say of the vast fields of Lanayru? The rolling hills and flower-dotted glens know no ravage of time. Even in the worst of upheavals, the fields remain calm, bloodless. Apart from the ruins of Oldcastle, there is no indication that violence had ever transpired here. Many immigrants settled down in these fields after the Conquest War, spurred by the promise of a peaceful life. Farmsteads on this land yield healthy and generous crops. Horses and cows meander over the fields, driven by cattlemen and their children. There is a tranquility in the green hills that no city-dweller may know, but must only admire from afar."

Samuel Red, _Common Life under Dragmire Rule_

* * *

Link awoke with a familiar smell in his nostrils. He turned on his side, aching, cold, mouth dry, and wondered where the usual warmth of the stable had gone—his itchy blanket, the soft breath of the horses, the rising and falling of black hounds' flanks. The scent of hay was comforting enough, but there was a smell beyond it, a bright, wide aroma that both exhilarated and frightened him. There was too much of a breeze between the thin shafts of the hay around him, and the light that pierced his eyelids was too bright. The floor beneath him seemed to rock, to move with the steady motion of a walking animal. With a jolt, he realized that despite being completely covered in hay, he was no longer in the stable. He bolted upright, opening his eyes, struggling to his knees in the shuddering hay. He saw the curve of an off-white tarp above him, worn and stained, and beyond that…

Blue sky, wide, green fields, swaying like a living creature in the wind. He tumbled to the edge of the wagon bed and leaned out the back, watching the grass dance, smelling the exotic breeze, filled with pollen and life. At the far end of the rocky brown road which wound past hills and through valleys, he spied the distant, black tips of the royal palace, standing tall against the clear sky. The city, its smells, his animals, his friends—had all shrunk to minuscule proportions at the end of his vision.

He stumbled forward, out of the cart, and landed on his side on the hard road. Pain swept through him, but he struggled to his feet and started back along the road. His life lay at the end of this worn thoroughfare, with all its stink and pressure and confusion. He needed to get back—Talon would no doubt wonder where he was, why he did not come when the smell of gristle-fried onions permeated the stable.

And the horse—that magnificent warhorse, he was lost without her. She was no doubt making her way around the corral, white tail flicking eagerly, looking for him. The hounds would be barking, hungry, wagging their tails for his return. No, he had to get back, he had to—

Suddenly two people stood between him and his route home. They were tall, dark-skinned and strange—the woman, he thought he recognized. The other, with his narrowed eyes and pursed lips, was not familiar to him. He tried to push past them to get back to the city, but the woman reached out and grabbed him. She pushed him back against the cart and gripped his arms, forcing him to stare into her uncanny red eyes. She held him still, and his panic subsided; he felt himself relax in her firm grip, and his mind slowed its alarmed frenzy. He took a deep, almost painful breath, and she moved her hand up from his elbow to the tender spot below his collarbone.

He remembered. He remembered the arrow burying itself in his shoulder, the pain and momentum that pushed him off the battlements and into the moat. He remembered following this dark-skinned woman through the halls of the palace, he remembered a powerful, golden light. But he could not recall why he was in the palace in the first place. He did not belong there—he belonged in the stables, with the other animals.

The image of a yellow-haired young woman, dressed in lace and a lovely gown, passed through his mind. He held onto that picture, desperately, until it faded into a more terrifying picture. He could not suppress the image of the girl, falling above him, eyes wide with fear. He remembered the shaft of black arrow protruding from her neck, the flow of blood as it dotted the air behind her like so many dark stars, and he remembered the guilt coursing through him when he saw her eyes dim and her body go limp. He did not remember what happened after they hit the water—his entire memory was blank from that point until he woke up in the back of this cart, covered in hay, far from the city.

It felt like something heavy dropped through him, forcing his stomach downward. Nausea bubbled up from his insides, and he gulped. He looked back over the wide road, over the shoulder of the woman holding him, and saw the towers gleaming in the sky.

He realized he couldn't go home. He could never walk across that corral again, never lay down to sleep under the picture of the redheaded girl and Talon's sweet-smelling candle. He would not see the barkeep's wife, nor taste the hot mulled wine she made. He would never ride the red warhorse again, never feel her mane in his fingers, never smell her breath. He knew the guards would kill him on the spot if they saw him again—and it was no less than he deserved for his trespasses. He sank to his knees, staring past the woman's waist to the palace beyond, almost lifting his hand to reach for it.

Instead, he brought his hands to his eyes, trying to keep in the moisture that gathered at the edge of his lids. He felt the tears drip down the insides of his palms, lingering in the crests of his skin before falling past his wrists into the dirt. He shook his head, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to rub out the image of the yellow-haired girl, falling, blue eyes staring at him…

The woman—Impa, he remembered—lifted him from the ground with a stern but kind hand. He hung his head as she gripped him and guided him back up to the hay of the wagon bed, where he sat limply, staring out the back. She and her companion disappeared, and Link felt the wagon sway a little when they climbed up front.

He folded his arms across the back of the vehicle and stared across the fields, eyes settling on the unreachable palace. He sighed, lifting his gaze to the gray clouds that gathered above them, and crawled back under the hay, where he could keep warm.

* * *

"You think we should stop at Oldcastle?" Palo asked. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and lightly flicked the reins in his hands, urging the mule forward.

"It's always a good idea to skip Oldcastle," Impa replied. She pulled up her hood and leaned back, trying to force herself to fall back asleep. The sun set almost warily behind them, as if watching their trail, keeping track. She did not appreciate the sinister way it looked this evening, so she insisted they continue past the cluster of towns south of the Capital to a safer, less populated place.

"Never liked Oldcastle myself," Palo muttered. "It's a bit noisy for me."

Impa pulled her cloak tighter, steeling herself against the cold. She, too, disliked the town. Every time she passed the ruined towers and crumbled battlements of the old family's abode, an inexplicable sadness filled her. She attributed it to the guilt of her tribe's failure to protect the royal family during the Conquest War, but she knew better than to think she was responsible for the mistakes of her ancestors. She was no fan of the seedy markets that popped up in the ruined castle's shadows, the shanties and gambling rings and dilapidated inns. It was a city of vagrants and leftovers, of ruin and shame. She did not want to stop there—nobody did, unless they had shady business to attend to without the prying eyes of the Capital guards around to halt the transactions.

Her father once told her Oldcastle was where the King bought his slaves. Of course, he would never condescend to make the trip himself, but every once in a while a caravan of guards and servants would march down the main thoroughfare toward the decaying town, and return with a few new members among their ranks. Impa did not know from where these unlucky vassals arrived, but her guess would be the poorer regions of the southern provinces, perhaps a few desperate Gerudo settlements on the border, near Silk.

Impa turned her head, gazing behind her into the wagon, to the sleeping stableboy. She wondered if he had been discovered at Oldcastle, branded and brought to the King's palace, and at what age, in what state. A wave of pity swept through her, and her heart twisted a little in her chest. What a sorry lot to be dealt, especially for a man so young.

Their little cart, unhindered and unfollowed—as far as she or Palo could see, and they could see far—rattled past the ruins of Oldcastle. A few loud, hungry children followed them, emerging from the large cracks in the crumbling city wall, stumbling from their lean-tos and shacks, pale hands outstretched, voices rising over the squeak of the wagon wheels to ask for food or money. Palo urged their tired old mule into a trot, rumbling down the road, away from the children, but Impa couldn't help but look behind her at their ghoulish, almost evil faces. She shivered, and instinctively drew her cloak tighter around her, wishing that she could crawl into the wagon bed with the stableboy and use him for warmth. But she locked her eyes on the road, watching for trouble, as the wagon rattled south, past Oldcastle and into the warmer, brighter fields of Lanayru province.

When they stopped for the night, they pulled the cart off the road, between the crest of two round hills. The stableboy, evidently awoken by the sudden roughness of off-road travel, poked his head out the back of the wagon and, seeing it was safe, stepped out. He stretched, touching his filthy, worn boots on the toes before bending back, reaching his hands toward the sky.

When Impa built a small fire, he dared to sit next to it, extending his white hands for warmth. He wore no expression on his face, but his eyes were red and wet. Somehow, they seemed bluer, bigger, for having shed so many tears. She wondered if he had cried in his sleep or if he was awake the whole time, weeping silently in the back of their wagon.

He said nothing, of course. He barely lifted his eyes from the fire, and when Impa handed a plate of boiled rice over to him, he shook his head and merely lay down, curling himself tight, like a cold dog. He wrapped his hands around his knees and closed his eyes, sighing. It was a chilly night, and Impa did not know why he would rather sleep out here under the elements than in the safety of the wagon bed.

The mule, tied to the wagon, lounged at the end of its rope, leaning almost subconsciously toward the boy. She watched the way its ears pricked forward whenever he made a sound, whenever he shifted slightly to get more comfortable. Curious, Impa stood up and untied the animal.

"What the hell are you doing?" Palo asked, not without a hint of amusement.

Impa said nothing, but watched the mule walk slowly to the slumbering boy, craning its neck to snort at his golden hair. After a few whiffs, it sauntered beside him and lay down on the soft grass. Without waking, the boy turned over, reaching toward it, leaning on its soft, warm belly. Impa could see him relax, see his breathing slow, as he fell into deeper sleep.

"Well I'll be damned," Palo said. "I was wondering why Balras' monster cat liked him so much."

"There's something remarkable about him," Impa admitted. "But I can't quite put my finger on it."

"He does have an affinity for beasts, that's for sure." Palo paused, smiling. "But that might only be because they're on equal footing when it comes to holding conversation."

Impa smacked his arm, but couldn't stop herself from grinning a little. She raised a handful of rice to her lips and chewed thoughtfully. "He is an interesting creature."

"He certainly cries a lot."

"He's scared, Palo. He's just been forced out of his life. He's leaving behind everything he's ever known."

"How do you know it's all he's ever known?"

"I've watched him for a while. I was curious about him, so I followed him for a few days. I stood by while he lived his life, did his work, visited our princess." Palo raised his eyebrows suspiciously. "He found her while looking for me. You know he went to her window every day before her father was killed. He brought her a puppy, once."

"Pretty devoted, for a kid that just met her."

"People in the Capital can be… harsh. They treated him like livestock most of the time—it shouldn't be surprising he'd value an act of kindness or two from a pretty girl."

Palo smiled. "Impa the people-reader. Never thought you had it in you."

"He's clever, I think. He's clever and resourceful, but he was certainly dealt a raw deal. Living without one of his senses, forced to work in the King's stables."

Palo leaned back, folding his hands behind his head and staring into the sky. "I guess we'll be wanted now, for stealing a piece of the King's property."

"It's the least we've done," Impa answered. She finished her rice and wiped her hands on her pants, sighing. "Palo, what are we going to do with him?"

He took out his knife, the blade glinting in the firelight, and started to pick at bits and pieces of dinner in his teeth. "We could drop him off in Lonlon. He'd no doubt be at home there, with his fellow horse-people."

Impa imagined abandoning him in the small town, in front of a saloon, with nothing but his wits and horsemanship to get by. She knew it was probably his best shot at happiness, but some unnamed objection, some undeniable thought at the back of her head told her that leaving him would be nothing short of betrayal. "No… Lonlon is too close to the Capital. If anyone gets a glimpse of his brand, they'll sell him back to the crown, and they'll kill him for his attempted escape. Besides…" She glanced over at the sleeping stableboy, huddled against the old gray mule, but didn't finish.

"He's deaf?" Palo guessed for her. She nodded, but she couldn't remember if that was what she was going to say. "Well, it's not like you to disbelieve in someone because of a handicap, but I see your point about the brand." He cleaned his knife against his tabard and slipped it back into its sheath. "But what are we gonna do, take him to Kakariko?"

Impa gulped. "I suppose so."

Palo turned and looked at her, eyes glinting, almost amused. "Then we'll see what the elder thinks about our discoveries."

Impa lay down beside Palo, putting her hands over her face and sighing loudly. "What will she say when we return with nothing but a deaf stableboy and word of imminent war? Not to mention the news of Balras' betrayal…"

As she trailed off, Palo picked up the train of conversation. "She'll no doubt cast you out of the tribe, order the removal of your tattoos and the erasure of your name from our history."

Impa shot him an odious glare.

"Impa, she's a wise woman. Why do you think she's survived long enough to become our elder? She won't blame you, because you're not at fault. She will take the information as she usually does, with that wrinkled old half-smirk, and she'll miraculously know what to do."

Impa was not sure how she felt about Palo's playful disparaging of their esteemed chieftain, but she had to admit he had a point. The elder of Kakariko was knowledgable and kind—not to mention a close friend of Impa's late grandmother—she would not cast Impa to the wolves. She might, however, out of necessity, do the same to the stableboy.

Impa turned to her side, facing away from Palo. She could feel his warmth, and comforted herself with it. "Are you going to keep first watch?"

"I might as well. You know me. Rather stay up late than wake up early."

"Goodnight, Palo," she sighed, folding her hands under her head. "And… I'm sorry. I truly am."

"No use complaining about it now," he replied. But she could sense the disappointment, the hopelessness in his words. Even though Palo looked forward, not back—so forward, in fact, he could see straight into inevitable death itself—even he could not escape the regret of their failed mission. It seemed the egregious mistakes of their recent past could upset even him.


	11. To Eldin

"If one does not understand the music of birds, then one understands nothing at all."

Unknown, attributed to Sage Sahasrahla

* * *

When the morning came, and safety with it, Impa took a few minutes to dig her old harp out of the back of the wagon. She put the strap over her shoulder and hung it between her knees, twisting her tuning peg and plucking a few notes. Palo turned over in his fitful sleep, and the stableboy, of course, did not move an inch. He stayed immersed in peaceful slumber, curled next to the mule, who watched Impa curiously, ears twitching. She strummed a chord, letting the motion of the notes flow through her fingers and up her arm. She breathed with the music, plucking whichever string tickled her fancy, following the whims and instincts of her muscles alone.

It was a meditation practice that she often needed. When the road ahead of her was foggy with unrest and indecision, when her regrets caught up to her, when she felt alone, disconnected, she could always find comfort in her harp. It was a small instrument, worn from years of use—her father had given it to her when it turned out he hadn't the knack for music. Apparently it had been gifted to him by his own father, but he saw it was better used in the hands of Impa than his own. She had been about six when he gave her the instrument, and she played it as often as possible, letting her mind wander, empty, over the strings, coaxing music out of it as quickly as it came to her.

"Honestly Impa," Palo groaned, sitting up. His hair, caked in dirt, stuck up like so many yellowish flames from his dark forehead. "Do you have to carry that thing around with you everywhere you go?" He stretched and yawned, pulling himself up from the rocky ground.

"It's as essential to me as any weapon," she told him, probably for the thousandth time. It seemed no matter how often she reiterated that sentiment, Palo would always smirk at her for choosing to waste space carrying an instrument rather than something more useful.

Palo wandered over to the cart, and Impa focused her attention on the sleeping stableboy, turning over the possibility that if he could not hear her music, he might be able to feel it in the air, through the ground. His ears twitched slightly, as if they knew they should be listening, but didn't quite know how. As she strummed her chords, a songbird alighted on the boy's shoulder, twittering loudly. It hopped from his arm to his half-curled fingers, head quivering, eyes bright and black. It ruffled its red plumage, reaching back and plucking a stray feather from its blood-colored wing, little black feet clutching the stableboy's fingers tightly. He turned over in his sleep, and the bird took flight, fluttering into the sky, lost beyond the hills.

The boy yawned, leaning against the mule as he pulled himself into a sitting position. He rubbed his eyes and looked up at Impa, sitting with her harp on the other side of their small encampment, plucking away. He narrowed his eyes, scooting toward her across the dirt like a curious animal. Impa smiled at him, beckoning him with her eyes, and he seated himself beside her, reaching out for the instrument.

She gave it to him. He pulled it into his lap, as he had seen her do, and pulled on a string. He let it go, sharp and simple, and watched its vibration closely. He lay his hand on the small soundboard and closed his eyes, frowning. He plucked another string, and another, one hand on the wood of the instrument, the other dancing along the strings aimlessly, meaninglessly. Impa was not sure if he was sensitive enough to recognize the subtleties in vibration in the harp's body, but he kept feeling the notes, feeling the wood with unmatched concentration. The delicacy of his touch surprised her—the notes, of course, made no sense, but the sentiment of his expression was there.

The way he cradled the harp and drew his hand across it filled her with an acute sorrow. She sighed as the grief flew from his nonsensical music into her keenly listening ears. She could relate to his somewhat avant-garde playing. He had lost everything he knew, and Impa had lost everything she had hoped for. She had failed herself, failed her family, her village, Palo, the kingdom—somehow, she'd failed even this peculiar stableboy, the only person she had managed to save.

And now she would have to report back home with that failure. She would have to face the stern but kind reception of the village elder, she would have to endure her father's disappointed frown, her mother's earnest but unwanted encouragement, her sister's smug assurance that she could've done a much better job. She thought about their faces, the subtext of their greetings, and shook her head.

Lost in thought, she barely noticed when the stableboy handed back her harp. It seemed he had lost interest in a device that produced sounds he couldn't hear, and she took the instrument from him, resuming her directionless strumming. She found herself pulling at the notes more fiercely, fingers almost burning with the effort. She stopped abruptly and turned to the curious stableboy.

"You know," she started, knowing full well he could not hear her, "I never caught your name."

He tilted his head, narrowing one eye, as if that could help him make out her words. She just put the harp aside and leaned forward, mouthing her own name slowly while pointing to her own chest. She moved her finger to his and nudged his sternum, and he nodded with understanding.

Then he mouthed his own strange name, letting loose what barely counted as a breath. She strained to hear him, and he repeated himself. "If that's what you think passes for speaking, you have a lot to learn about conversation," she muttered.

The boy merely repeated himself again. "Link."

 _Link._ She did not bother to speak the word aloud, but formed the shape with her mouth. The young man nodded at her silent pronunciation. Impa pointed to Palo, still fiddling with the wagon, getting it ready to travel. "Palo," she said.

"Mal," the boy repeated.

She took his wrist and held it up to her mouth, puffing air against the sensitive hairs on the back of his hand. "Palo."

He repeated the name, slowly, and Impa nodded. The boy stood and dusted himself off before wandering back to the mule. Palo emerged from behind the cart and stood by Impa, watching the boy. "Well, now that we're all introduced, we might as well hit the road," he said.

Link reached out a hand to the mule, and it stood eagerly. Without touching the animal, he led it to the yoke and got it to stand patiently, waiting.

Palo glanced at Impa before stepping up to the animal and attaching it to the wagon. The beast, usually a stubborn nuisance, endured the handling, occasionally twisting its head back to look at the stableboy.

When the speechless Palo managed to yoke the animal to the cart, Link tugged at his sleeve and gestured toward the wagon. Palo looked back at Impa, face contorted in confusion. "What's he trying to say?" he asked.

"I think he wants to ride in the front."

"He's not riding in the front. There's no room."

"Then you can sit in the wagon bed."

Palo crossed his arms, frowning, took one look at the eager boy, eyes now dry, head lifted, and shook his head.

* * *

The rolling fields that spread from the town of Old Riko were yellow with autumn. Here and there a few shady groves of deciduous trees shuddered in the wind, shedding brown and red leaves of every shape.

Impa steered the wagon into the shade of a cluster of trees to rest the old mule. The wind was chill but refreshing, and it still surprised her that all the leaves of Eldin had turned while she had been away. They quivered and fell from their branches like delicate paper, twisting in the wind, reminding her of how long she'd been gone.

Impa took a deep breath of the familiar air and smiled. She jumped from the cart, helping the stableboy down beside her, as Palo poked his head out of the bed. "We there yet?" he yawned.

Impa didn't answer. She pulled their sack of provisions from the wagon and prepared their midday meal of salted meat and hard bread. Link found a tree and relieved himself behind it before wandering a little east of the grove. He stared up at the mountains, rising like sudden, jagged knives over the gentle foothills. They shone bright and red in the high sunlight, dotted with trees, whitened at the tips with early snowfall. He stared at them so long and so intently, Palo had to grab his arm to bring to attention the fact that lunch was ready and waiting.

He ate quickly, eyes wandering again to the east, finding their way up toward the mountains, and the distant, tall windmill of Old Riko. Its long brown arms circled in the breeze, creaking with age and rust. Impa could almost hear the old gears turning from their little grove.

But it seemed the windmill itself did not hold too much interest for the boy. He finished his lunch, stuffing his mouth with cheese as if in some sort of hurry, and stood up. Palo, announcing he had to take a piss, wandered into the trees, and Link trotted back to the wagon. Impa followed him, curious, and he reached down into the bed of hay where Palo had been sleeping. He pulled out a long, thin blade, still safe in its scabbard, and showed it to Impa.

"That belongs to Palo," she said, most likely unhelpfully.

The young man squinted at her and then shook his head. He pointed to her blade sitting at her hip and drew Palo's sword out of its sheath, metal glinting. He held it up with both hands, the blade wavering clumsily.

Impa lay a hand on the hilt at her side. "You want me to teach you?"

He just stared at her, and she could not decipher his look. It seemed to be of some sort of rudimentary understanding. Impa widened her stance and drew her blade, and the smile that flashed across Link's face told her she'd done what he wanted.

"This will be an interesting session," Impa muttered to herself. She had never had a student like this before, an untrained Hylian peasant, deaf to boot. She circled the boy, raising her blade, and he matched her movements. She saw his eyes dart from her sword to her feet, to her elbows, her face, back to her sword.

Impa wondered why Link would harbor the desire to learn swordsmanship. Perhaps he guessed that if he was to be exiled from his home, condemned to wander the wilderness of Hyrule as a wanted criminal, he might as well learn to defend himself. Maybe he regretted his inability to protect the princess, like Impa. Maybe he simply admired their weapons and desired to use one himself. Impa could understand any of these reasons—one of her first memories was looking at the weapon at her father's side, with an intense desire to wield one of her own like he did, with grace and dignity. It had been pure admiration that stirred the beginnings of the little warrior inside her; perhaps the stableboy had the same spirit, the same courage, but never had the opportunity to nourish it.

Impa struck down at Link, gently but quickly. He saw the slight bend of the blade against the light and raised his own. With a satisfying clang, he parried her strike, and she backed up, smiling. He glanced over the sword, as if to make sure it hadn't broken in his hands, wide-eyed and confounded at his own strength. Impa did not give him time to revel in his success; she stepped in and threw a wide swing. He barely had time to jump out of the way, but still, he evaded her blade. His form was terrible, his grip shaky, but he had an uncanny instinct that impressed her.

She could not say for sure if this boy had ever wielded a sword in his life, but the weapon fell naturally into his hands, becoming a part of his movement. She figured he could take clues from her stance others with all their senses could not—with his keen eyesight, he might be able to detect a movement of her knee, a twist of her elbow, that told him where she would strike next.

She decided to test this theory. She let her body slacken, momentarily overriding her muscle memory. She chose the unpredictable over the efficient—stepped left and swung right, lowered her body but raised her sword. The boy, watching her movements closely, fell for her scheme; he parried a strike that never came, and she landed a hard blow to his side with the flat of her sword. The boy bent over, dropping Palo's weapon, and hugged his ribs, coughing.

Impa sheathed her own blade, worried for a moment she had been too rough. She bent down beside the boy, and he pulled himself to his feet, waving her away. She took a good look at his face and saw a slight smile through his pained grimace. He must've known, even without experience or hearing, what he was getting himself into. Perhaps he'd seen the palace guards spar with one another, or had watched one of the many tournaments the King sponsored but never condescended to attend. Either way, he wore his slight injury like a mark of pride, of improvement.

Impa's father had always insisted if you didn't bruise a sparring partner, you were insulting his skill.

"What the hell are you two doing?" Palo asked, emerging from the brush and adjusting his belt. He looked them over, at the boy bent over, holding his stomach, blade at his feet. "You're dulling my sword," he said, frowning. He sauntered over to Link and retrieved the weapon, taking a moment to examine its edge. He frowned, turning it over in his hands, thinking, before handing it back to Link. The stableboy grasped it in his eager hand, getting the feel of the grip again.

Impa took a long look at his stance and sighed. "No," she started, walking toward him. "Traditional Sheikah form dictates you hold it in your dominant hand—"

She tried to show him the proper way, switching her blade from left to right. She, of course, could fight with either, but training began with the right, and moved to the left only after years of intense practice.

The boy clutched the sword with his front hand, staring at her meaningless gestures. Palo leaned up against the wagon and laughed. "Let him fight the way he wants, Impa. He's already well behind the curve—he needs all the advantages he can get."

"Proper form is an advantage," Impa said, but gave in. She had been pleasantly surprised at the boy's proclivity—she did not want to stifle his instinct for it. If he fought best improperly, she might as well let him. He might not need his swordsmanship for long anyway, if the elder decided he was too much of a liability to keep alive.

She sparred with Link for a few more minutes, until he dropped Palo's sword in favor of rubbing the bruises she had inflicted on his sides and legs. He bent over, panting, and shook sweat from his blond hair. Palo, more interested in getting back on the road than watching Impa give a rudimentary lesson in swordsmanship to a deaf Hylian, took the opportunity to snatch his sword back and stuff it in the bed of the wagon with their other supplies.

When they loaded up, Link in front, as he insisted, Impa driving, and Palo reclining in the back, they rattled their way down the road, toward the tall windmill of Old Riko.

Instead of keeping her eyes entirely on the road, Impa preferred to watch Link beside her, eagerly absorbing the sights and smells of the outside world. If he had been born a servant, or had been bought young, he might not even remember what the real Hyrule, the vast, old lands, were really like. Any palace servant had to obtain express permission to leave the city, and Impa was certain this boy had no business out in the countryside.

The way he looked at everything, staring at the treetops, the leaves, the old houses leaning precariously against the cliffs on the side of the road, made Impa think that this was indeed the first time he'd been outside. Every once in a while, he closed his eyes and leaned back, breathing in the scents around him, enjoying the fresh wind on his face.

He had lived in the acrid smoke and smog of the city for so long, it must be like waking up for the first time. Perhaps he was now learning what it was like to breathe real, fresh air, to see growing things and expansive wilderness. Perhaps this was the first time he found himself on the outside of a wall, like an animal freed from a cage.

His face had a joyful, yet resigned, look to it. He seemed ambivalent about having escaped the city. His face fell and rose like the breeze, a contrite frown easily making way for a wide-eyed gasp at a new sight, or a look of awe when he glanced to the clear autumn sky. A part of him may have been thankful to have left the city, now that he knew what the outside was like, but she could also tell that he would not forget the sacrifice it took to get him out here. He had clung to the princess, following her eagerly, and even if she did not make the journey, he had hurdled her corpse into the outside world. He would not soon forget what it had cost to obtain freedom—and neither would Impa.

* * *

The rickety houses of Old Riko rose before them, boasting brightly shingled roofs, ornate porches and plentiful gardens. The old dirt road made way for solid red brick, and windy smells of the pastures disappeared into the billowing scents of bakeries, blacksmiths and pubs. To the north, the silhouettes of Mount Eldin and its squatter, wider counterpart cast their protective shadows over the town.

Link's eyes rushed from sight to sight as he desperately attempted to drink it all in. Men and women went about their business, dressed in the burlap pantaloons of miners, the aprons of bakers and butchers, in the wide hats of shepherds and field workers. A group of young ladies, dressed in the latest fashions from the Capital, giggled around a table of a café, adjusting the feathers in their hats when the wind displaced them. A well-fed orange cat jumped from a windowsill and crossed the road in front of their mule, forcing him to hesitate before snorting and stamping along the brick thoroughfare.

The windmill creaked high in the sky, and the town's ornate playhouse rose before them, flanked by clipped shrubberies and unlit street lamps. Impa steered the cart away from the building, out of the crowds and into the side streets, where smoke and animal smells permeated the air. They passed smithies and stables, a few run-down houses and pubs, until they came to a smoke-streaked barn. A small shop leaned against it, almost drunkenly, and a thin man emerged from the shadows when Impa pulled up. She slid off the side of the wagon, Link following suit, and gave him a short Sheikah salute.

The shopkeeper did not smile at their appearance, but seemed relieved that his mule came back alive.

"Did my wagon serve you well?" he asked.

"Well enough," Impa replied. She tapped on the bed until Palo awoke and stumbled out, a puff of dust and hay falling behind him. He reached back and pulled their supplies out after him, tightening the drawstrings on their bags, making sure the case over Impa's small harp was shut tightly. He readied their luggage for their trip up the mountain while Impa extended her hand to the shopkeeper. He slipped as much money as he had promised in the event they should return with everything intact, and led his mule, still yoked to the wagon, to the fences behind the barn.

Whenever Impa or any member of her tribe had use of a mount, they had to procure it somehow from Old Riko, since no horse or mule, much less with a wagon, could make the trip up the steep slopes of Eldin. This particular shopkeeper had been providing them with necessary beasts and vehicles since Impa was a small child, and she knew his animals were healthy, his wagons tough and well kept. She did not know how he got into business with the Sheikah, but he would do them plenty of favors—for a price, of course. She wondered if he was part Sheikah himself—he shared the same dark skin as her tribe, but did not sport the iconic tattoos. She had never mustered the courage to ask, and had long since stopped wondering about the subject. She had plenty of other things to wonder about now.

The three of them, freed from the burden on their wagon but now weighed by their packs, started down the street. Impa led Link by the hand, toward the shadows of the mountains. He did not stop twisting his head to catch every sight he could of the old town, even if the district they now traversed held little more than creaking old houses and rundown shops.

When they reached the edge of the town, where the houses and pastures ended and the forest began, Impa looked over to Palo. He nodded, and she grasped the stableboy's arm. He whipped around, almost angry that she had disturbed his sightseeing. He looked strangely natural in the shadows of the trees, as if he belonged here in the wild reaches of Eldin. She looked him in the eyes, making sure she had his attention, then unwound the sash at her waist.

He tried to back off when she raised it to his eyes. He smacked away the cloth and shook his head, gesturing to all the new things around him.

"I know you want to see everything," Impa said uselessly, "but if you do, we'll have to pluck out your eyes entirely."

He shook his head and backed away when she tried to blindfold him again, almost turning tail and running back to the safety of Old Riko. Impa grunted impatiently and grasped his wrist before he could escape. He wiggled in her grip like a trapped animal, shaking his head furiously, pushing the sash away when she tried to wrap it around him.

The boy finally went still and complied, but only after Palo stepped up behind him and knocked him out cold with the pommel of his sword. Link fell limp into Impa's outstretched arms, and she looked up at Palo, who gave her his best shrug.

She found herself laughing a little as she wrapped the sash around Link's head, avoiding the egg-like bump where Palo had struck him. She slipped out of her pack and handed it to her partner before tightening the cloth over Link's eyes and throwing his arms over her shoulders. She put a hand under each of his legs and pulled him onto her back. She struggled to get him balanced, but when she had him secure, she stepped toward Palo.

"Can you tie his hands together? He'll slip off."

Palo pulled a cord from his waist and wound it tightly around the boy's wrists before wrapping it around her ribs. "You know, this would be easier to hold here if you had any breasts."

"Perhaps I should grow them," Impa replied, smirking. She took a deep breath and readjusted the boy on her back. "This is going to be a long hike," she muttered.

Palo merely shook his head and started through the woods, taking a path impossible to find if one did not already know the way. Impa followed him through the thick forest red with autumn, panting under Link's dead weight. She slipped through the shadows, silently, as she carried her weight up the mountain.


	12. Kakariko Village

"Why did I become a traveling bard in the first place? Why did I throw away my life to wander alone, hungry and sleepless, among fields and towns hostile and strange to me? Why, to escape my family, of course."

T. L. Malona, _Life and Travels of a Wayward Bard_

* * *

The lateness of the year cloaked Kakariko, draping it in reds and yellows and dark greens. Trees leaned over the squat abodes, shading the paths, reddening ferns, stone fences and tiny, numerous shrines to spirits so old even the elder could not remember their names. The forest surrounding the village had been purposefully thickened, through decades of meticulous sylviculture, to hide it from any wandering woodsmen or prying eyes. Sometimes even Impa had a difficult time believing she could find her way home—but she knew better than to distrust her own instincts. She did not need instruction, repetition, or a map; she had been born here, raised here, and could sense the place from leagues away. There was a saying among her tribe that she had never seen proven false: all Sheikah, no matter how far, can always find their way home.

When Impa and Palo hauled themselves up the last steep slope and into the village's wooded plateau, the sun had already retreated behind the foothills to the west. She stopped to catch her breath, taking in the sight of her village fading in the oncoming darkness. It felt almost dreamlike, to see the result of the passing months of her absence. She had left the village in the high summer, when the early vegetables had been harvested and the mountain peaks were bare and gray, when the wind was warmest, the river was deepest and the forest's cubs and fawns were coming into their own. Her sister had been looking forward to the upcoming operas at the Old Riko Playhouse, and her mother had been thinking of nothing but the garden. Not much would've changed with those two—only the playbills at the theater and the contents of the garden.

Impa adjusted Link on her back, still tied and blindfolded, but wide awake. He had perked up about halfway up the mountain, and had struggled to escape from her back, but Palo had unsheathed his sword and gently prodded his ribs until he calmed down. Devoid of sight, sound, and the feel of the ground beneath his feet, Link had little else to do but sit limply on Impa's tired back, likely kept company only by his guesses as to what they were going to do with him.

"Are you going to take him to your mother's house?" Palo asked her.

She sighed. "I suppose I can't take him anywhere else, at the moment."

Palo laughed. "Irma will be so pleased to see you've finally brought a man home. And a Hylian, no less. Who would've thought you had it in you?"

"I have no doubt my sister will be the first to jump on him for that purpose," Impa admitted, almost gloomily. She stepped down the road, toward the calm yellow glow of the familiar window at the end of the plateau. "I will meet you at the elder's in a few minutes," she said.

"Love of the spirits, Impa, give me some time to wash myself," he answered, sauntering in the direction of his own abode. "I smell like a dodongo's asshole."

"That is true." Impa looked over her shoulder at him as he crept off to the other edge of the village, where the trees shuddered thickest, casting long shadows over the burial grounds. Impa sighed, readjusting the stableboy on her back, and stepped toward her own home.

She had to admit she was eager to get Link's weight off her. He was lean, perhaps a little underfed, but he was no child. He was as heavy as he had been when she carried him from the moat to the doctor's house, and even then she hadn't carried him halfway up the slopes of a grand mountain (she only hoped acting as this young man's mule wouldn't become a habit).

She almost guiltily slinked up to her family's home and hesitated before the thick oak door. The scent of some sort of boiling tuber set her stomach rumbling, and the light that glowed in the window was stained with color and warmth.

Impa sighed, took a deep breath and reached out to knock. Before her fingers could touch the dark wood, the door swung open, and her sister, bright-eyed and eager, cast her tall shadow against the doorway. "It's about time," she said, beckoning Impa inside.

"Evening, Talm," she answered, stepping across the threshold into the warmth of her mother's house.

Impa's mother rushed furiously from the kitchen, yellow dress brushing against the dark wood floor. She trotted past the low table and threw her arms around her daughter with a cry. She seemed unconcerned with the presence of another person on her daughter's back, and Impa imagined she might as well be embracing him, too. When her mother let go, she rested a hand on Impa's cheek, over her red mark, where she always did. "I'm so glad you're safe."

Talm laughed, catching a glimpse of the boy on her back. "That's a funny-looking princess you've brought back to us."

Impa sighed, letting go of his legs. She had to bend with him as he stood shakily, and untied his wrists. He stood still, perhaps comforted by the warmth and smells, as she unwound his bonds and pulled the strip of silk from his face.

He took a stunned moment to drink in the image of her family. His eyes settled on Impa's mother, and a look of comfort crossed his face when he recognized another Hylian, brown hair drawn back in the southern style, frown tempered by the kindness in her dark blue eyes. Talm was most likely a strange sight to him—a true half-breed if Impa ever saw one—dressed in traditional clothes, face adorned in thick tattoos, but with her hair combed back like her mother's, into a dainty bun. When he had his curious fill of Talm and her mother, he looked to the house behind them, made of thick gray stone and dark wood, draped in tapestries of tribal symbols, ropes of silk, weaponry and tools. He backed up to the wall, mouth agape, blue eyes shining.

"He's not bad-looking for a boy princess," Talm admitted. "Certainly has that fragile, regal look about him."

"He's not the princess," Impa said.

"What's your name?" Talm asked him. He just stared at her, so she repeated herself, louder and more forcefully.

"No use shouting at him," Impa told her. "He's deaf."

"Oh, thank the spirits, I thought he was just _rude_." Talm edged closer to the stableboy, speaking slowly, emphasizing the movements of her lips, asking him his name, where he was from, how he ended up in Kakariko.

"Let him be, Talm. He's had a long journey."

"And so have you," Impa's mother put in, grabbing her hand and leading her to the low table. "Sit, I'll feed you both."

"I really need to get to the elder and explain myself," Impa said, but her mother would have none of it. When it came to hospitality, Irma was a hurricane; there was no bargaining with her, no point in declining her gifts and gestures. She almost shoved Impa down in front of the table, leaving Talm to lead Link over and seat him beside her.

"Merel will be pleased to see you've brought a husband home," her sister said, eyeing the stableboy. Impa shook her head and accepted the steaming bowl her mother miraculously produced. She raised it to her lips, reveling in the savory scent of it, letting the steam warm her face. Irma rushed back into the small kitchen, returning with another bowl, and pushed it over to Link. He stared at it for a few seconds, then looked over at Impa (for instructions, permission, or what else—she didn't know), and finally raised it to his own mouth. Neither of them had eaten since that morning, so they had little room for words between the gulps of soup.

It wasn't new in the household for Talm to dominate the conversation. She leaned over the table, folding her arms almost deviously, and smiled. "You've got some explaining to do," she said. "Why you brought us a deaf guy instead of the heir to the throne."

Impa set her bowl on the table, emptied. "I will speak with elder Merel this evening. It is up to her to decide what we do with him."

The boy in question lowered his bowl and stared across the table at the far wall, eyes dimming. The paleness of shock lightened his face, as if he had just now come to realize exactly how far he'd wandered from his stable. He lowered his gaze to his empty bowl, and a pained look crossed his soft features. Impa couldn't stop herself from reaching out and touching his arm gently. He looked up at her, and she saw a myriad of expressions pass through his eyes—gratefulness, fear, relief, remorse, anticipation. The protean mix of emotions that slightly contorted his face were eclipsed behind what Impa knew to be abject confusion.

He did not know why this was happening to him—why strangers had felt the need to invade his life and steal him away, why he had to suffer imprisonment and even grave injury when he had done nothing wrong. He had done nothing to deserve any of this—at least that she knew of.

"Well, for his sake I hope Merel decides he's no threat," Talm said, leaning forward on her elbows. She folded her delicate fingers and rested her chin on them, big red eyes shining. "Shame to waste such a pretty face."

"Talm, don't be like that," Impa's mother said, sitting down opposite them.

"It's not like he can hear me."

Impa sighed, lowering her head for a moment. Palo should be on his way to the elder's abode about now, cleaned up and ready to announce their spectacular failure. She reached over to the stableboy's elbow and tapped him before motioning for him to stand. He obeyed, still giving her all those impenetrably complex looks as he followed her away from the table.

"Are you not going to rest longer?" her mother called, with the familiar half-hurt frown she wore whenever anyone threatened to leave her house. Talm just sat beside her, smiling, hands still folded.

"I have to make a report," she said, leading Link to the door. "I'll be back in a little while." She shoved him into the cold night air and led him down the dirt path toward the north side of town, where the steepest slopes of Mount Eldin jutted from the village's plateau. Carved into the cliffs that stood jagged and brown on the mountainside lay the elder's home—a cave partitioned into ornate rooms, adorned with pillars, fireplaces and shrines, decorated with tapestries and furnished with all the amenities a Sheikah elder would need. It had divining runes, ritual staves and blessed weaponry lining the smoothly carved walls, a large fire pit near the entrance where village meetings could be conducted in peace and with plenty of light. Deeper into the mountain lay the elder's private quarters, where she slept and bathed, relying on the steam and water pumped up from the hot spring under the mountain for her heat.

Impa's father once told her that the elder lived in the side of Mount Eldin because that was as close as one could get to the spiritual center of the clan, where her powers were strongest, and where her authority was most apparent. He had sat her on his shoulders and told her if she was lucky to live long enough, she might become elder someday, and then she'd get to wander the halls of that sacred residence, leading the village both politically and spiritually.

Impa was sure she still had a few decades to meander through—not to mention more than a few pearls of wisdom to gain—before she could move into Merel's spacious cave. It seemed a little too big and lonely for one person, but back in the time before the Conquest, when the Sheikah spoke the old language and the spirits still lived among them, the elder's abode needed all that space. Back when Kakariko wasn't the only village left, when each faction of their tribe had their own towns and settlements all over Eldin, the gatherings at Kakariko could boast hundreds of attendees, one representative of each Sheikah family. Now, with barely a few hundred members at all, much less a few hundred families, the tribe was an echo of what it had once been, and Kakariko merely the shell of its former self. Long ago, the empty, crumbling houses had been disassembled for their materials, but if one looked closely at the edges of the village, one could make out the dark impressions of where houses used to stand, or see the hardy sprouting of vegetables that had been planted generations ago in a domestic garden.

A few of these abandoned plots lined the path to the elder's cave, catching the sharp eye of the stableboy, lit only by the moon and the dancing of late season fireflies. Link slowed to stare at the plots—Impa had always considered them houses' graves—before following her up the shallow slope.

Palo met them at the last bend before the elder's abode, wearing a serious frown. He fell into step beside Impa wordlessly, and they walked up the narrow path, toward the flickering glow of light on the side of the hill. It looked like Merel had started a fire—it wouldn't surprise Impa to learn she had predicted their arrival and prepared ahead of time. Then again, one of the villagers could've spied them make their way into the town and sent word up. Impa usually found herself struggling to decide whether or not the elder could perform miracles of prognostication, or if she was just miraculously well-informed. Either trait was admirable enough.

When they arrived at the mouth of the cave, the elder stood to greet them, spreading her arms in a spiritual salute. She smiled on the other side of the roaring, almost boisterous fire, red eyes twinkling. Her wrinkled mouth widened into a smile, and she nodded her head to them.

Palo and Impa bent at the waist, showing their proper respect. When Link caught sight of them bowing, he threw himself to the ground, presumably to follow suit. He knelt and pressed his forehead into the stony cave floor, placing his hands above his head as if asking for them to be stepped on. It was a gesture of such shameless servility that Impa reddened with embarrassment. She almost wanted to step on his hands, to grind her heel into his palms, for thinking the elder so low as to appreciate such obsequiousness. But she merely reached down and grabbed his collar, tugging him back to his feet.

"Forgive him, elder," she said. "He doesn't know better."

"It is fine, children," Merel replied. "It is how he's been taught. He is from the Capital, yes?"

"Yes, elder."

The elder reseated herself, pulling out her long robe from under her and reclining on a pillow by the fire. She crossed her legs and closed her eyes, smiling. "Nobody escapes society without suffering the untruths of hierarchy. In time, he will unlearn."

It was a good sign. If the elder had waved her hand, given them a frown, told them to dispose of this boy who may now know too much about the Sheikah and their operations, she and Palo would have no choice but to cut him down and throw his body to the wolves of Eldin. She was not looking forward to that possibility. But now that Merel had admitted in passing the boy had at least the semblance of a future in which to discard his bad habits, it meant they weren't going to have to kill him quite yet.

Palo and Impa stepped toward the fire, and the cushions that awaited them. Link, still a little red in the face from his faux pas, came with them, head lowered, staring into the fire rather than look into the kind eyes of the venerable elder. Impa wanted to smack him upside the head for it, but she knew he did not know how to look into the eyes of an equal, respected and lauded though she may be.

Merel did not seem to care about his awkward, downcast eyes, or the way he clutched his own wrist as if holding on for dear life. She just smiled, the fire casting orange shadows across her dark skin and white hair. "With each absence you two grow a little more," the elder said, softly, with the husky voice like that of an ancient woodwind instrument. "Yet each time you return I am no less overjoyed to see you safe." Her kind smile disappeared after a second, replaced by a stern, intelligent interest. "What news from the Capital?"

"The rumors are true," Impa said gravely. "The King is preparing for war. We do not know with whom he plans to battle or when, but he is restless."

"We have some idea," the elder replied. "And we have sent your father ahead to scout. Wherever the King goes, Talporom will rise to meet him." Impa couldn't help but gulp as a swell of both pride and worry for her father rose in her chest. The elder did not seem to notice her strained look. She merely let her bright glance settle on Link. "Do you wish to tell me why he, and not the princess, is here with us tonight?" she asked, without malice, without judgement.

Impa lowered her eyes and grit her teeth. "Elder, we ran up against some unforeseen obstacles. Firstly…"

"Balras betrayed us," Palo said. "He sabotaged us. This whole mess is his fault. This boy, the princess, everything."

Impa glanced over to him. She kept her mouth taut, trying to conceal the look that crept across her face when she realized with something of a start that Palo had outright lied to the elder. The old woman just nodded, eyes glinting. Impa guessed she could discern the dishonesty in Palo's voice, but humored him anyway.

"Balras?" she said. "He is one of Talporom's oldest friends. What would drive him to seek the employ of the King?"

"We don't know, elder. We did not have time to apprehend him."

"Very well. I shall send a man to the Capital on the morrow to investigate. For now, explain to me why you have left the princess in the Capital in favor of bringing me this young man."

 _Dear gods, she's going to make me say it. She's going to make me recount every word._ Impa gulped. "Forgive me, elder."

"Forgive _us_ ," Palo interrupted, before pausing for a tense, painful moment. "The princess is dead. She fell to an arrow fired by a palace guard."

"We have lost the last known thread of the royal bloodline," Impa finished, desperate to clear the apparent despair from the elder's face. "But there may yet be others. We will continue the search."

Merel closed her eyes, breathing in the smoke from the sacred flames. Her chest rose and fell slowly, and her fingers hovered over the fire for a moment, as if trying to sculpt out a shape or prophecy in the heat.

"We could not even give her a proper burial," Impa told Merel, her voice straining with the effort of concealing her shame. "I apologize, elder. I have no words to express my regret that our mission to the Capital was a failure."

The wizened matriarch did not open her eyes or her mouth. The fire seemed to light up her skin and the red tattoos that decorated it. She wore the all-seeing eye on her forehead, a sign of her honored status as elder of the tribe, but she still sported the marks of her youth—the diamond tattoo between her brows, the thick bar of red down her chin that designated her as a healer. Impa's father shared those tattoos—he had been her protégé for many years before Impa was born, and had fought beside her during Mandrag Elgra's march on Death Mountain. The elder had been a good friend of Impa's grandmother's, and as long as she could remember, Merel had been like a grandmother herself.

Impa hoped Merel would have no choice but to forgive her. She might punish her, she might cast shame on her simply out of necessity, but she would not dole out anything Impa did not rightly deserve for her incompetence.

But the elder did not speak for a long while—she did not issue orders or punishments, she did not even move. For every second of her oracular silence, Impa's heart beat a little faster. She glanced over at Palo, who sat facing forward, ready for reprimand. Between them, the stableboy shuddered, looking into the fire that danced under Merel's open palms. His eyes were wide, frightened, and at one point his hand wandered to Impa's knee, touching it lightly. She could not blame the boy for reaching out for comfort, to make sure that he was not alone in this strange new place, in front of this thaumaturgical flame.

The elder's eyes opened slowly, and she smiled. "Neither of you had the strength or skill to save the scion of the royal family, and that is regrettable." Her eyes wandered from Palo to Link to Impa and back, burning as hotly as the flames below them. "But your mission was not a failure. I asked you to bring me a potential vessel of great godly power. You have brought me just that."

Both Impa and Palo whipped their heads to stare at Link. He shrank before their eyes, lowering his head, wringing his hands.

"Him?" Impa almost gasped. "Does he have the old blood?"

"No. He does not. But the fire tells things true, it tells things honest." Merel raised her head and looked at the cowering boy. "He does not seem it. He does not seem to play that part at all."

"No, he doesn't," Palo admitted.

"But, we as Sheikah always know seeming and being are entirely separate concepts." She lowered her hands, and the fire died down a little. The overpowering, almost magical swell of heat dissipated and they were left sitting before a few small yellow flames, licking eagerly at the air. "Impa, you will take him to the summit of Eldin. We shall see what the old spirits have to say about him."

Impa gulped, resisting the urge to protest, to tell the woman that no gods or spirits of Eldin had been seen for so long it was madness to believe they still existed at all. But what Merel decreed, she was obligated to carry out. She merely bowed her head, gritting her teeth.

When the fire shrank and cooled, Merel lifted herself from the pillow at its edge and yawned. "Forgive me, children. It seems that I tire quickly in my old age."

Palo and Impa bowed to her, keeping an eye on Link so he did the same, properly this time. The old woman bid them farewell, returning their bows before shuffling off into the darkness of her cave. The farther she stepped from the fire, the shallower the flames danced, and when she disappeared into her chambers, the light snuffed out. Impa and Palo lingered in the mouth of her cave for a while longer in stunned silence.

When they made their way to the entrance, Impa stared at the rising stars, sighing. The chilly wind seemed to stab her to the bone, forcing shivers up her spine. She looked over at Link, hugging himself against the cold and darkness. Palo seemed not to notice the weather, but started the trot down toward the village, shaking his head.

"What a time of year to send someone up Eldin," he said.

Impa did not answer. She would have to prepare carefully in the next few days, or else decide which friends and relatives got which of her possessions when she did not come back down from the peak. And Link—spirits' love, he wouldn't survive it. Men who were so lean and timid could not climb mountains, much less conquer them. But Impa had to admit she'd never heard an untrue word from elder Merel—she'd never heard anything other than wisdom from the old woman, despite all her inner protests and disagreements. Merel had proved Impa wrong more times than she could count.

"Palo," Impa said, stopping for a moment when they arrived at the fork in the path that would take Palo to his house, Impa to hers. He turned, worried half-smile playing on his lips. Impa hesitated, biting her lip, and decided not to say anything at all.

"Don't worry, Impa. You'll be fine. If Merel says you should go, then… well, you can't argue with the wisdom of age, can you?" He folded his hands behind his head. "You'll come back down. But if you don't, I get Bloodletter."

Impa let out an anxious laugh. "Fine. But don't misuse it."

"Do I ever misuse anything?" he asked.

"Besides every faculty you've been born with, no." She smiled weakly and left Palo at the crossroad, leading Link back down to the warmth and safety of her mother's house.


	13. Images in the Firelight

"Tallest among the mountains in the eastern province, Eldin dwarfs even the Gorons' ancestral home, Death Mountain. There are many a rumor on what lies at its peak—some say an ancient city in the sky, some say a ruined temple, some say the goddess Din herself. There is no one who knows besides the Sheikah, and even then, only a few select, elite elders. It is forbidden to speak of, even amongst the tribe itself, so what lies at the mountain's monstrous peak remains a mystery to this day."

R. Brunt, _My Explorations_

* * *

It was something that only happened a few times each century. It required days of preparation, even more of recovery. No one was sure if it was a punishment or a reward, if it was a test of strength or an attempt on one's life. But an expedition to the peak of Eldin was an event that shook the village to its very foundations with excitement.

Impa's mother recovered all of the wolfskin coats from storage, pulled out the wool blankets, the hats, gloves, protective goggles made of glass forged in the fires of Death Mountain, she dried the late squashes she picked from her garden, salted meat, cobbled Impa's boots and mended her worn sleeves. She entreated Palo for his old fur cloaks and breeches, and a hat and scarf that Link could wear, if they proved small enough. As the woman struggled to find him boots and a jacket that fit him, he just stared ahead, letting her maneuver his arms into sleeves and pull a pair of deerskin gloves over his fingers. By the way he sat contentedly under the doting hands of Impa's mother, she could tell he had come to accept the strange people around him and their strange habits and desires. He didn't have much of a choice—he knew he was at their mercy.

Talm just stood in the doorway, crossing and uncrossing her arms, tilting her head at the sight of her sister and the strange Hylian boy bundling and unbundling themselves in front of the fire. "Is Merel trying to kill you both, sending you up there this time of year?" she asked. Her worry was well-hidden, but still present. She might be a master of stealth and disguise but Impa knew her too well.

"We'll be fine," Impa said, wrapping a few dried vegetables and shoving them into their pack. "The first snows haven't even come yet. We'll be up and down by this time tomorrow."

"You're a liar, Impa." Talm said no more, just retreated to the shadows at the back of the house, where she let down her long hair and combed it thoroughly, meticulously. She turned away from the hearth, drawing the ivory comb through the wavy streaks of gold as Impa's mother returned from the shed.

"I found your father's old cloak," she said. "It might fit Link."

Link had given up resisting and sat with his back to the fire, watching Impa stuff necessities into their pack. There was a growing pile of items that her mother had brought her in the hopes it might ease the difficulty of their trip, and that both of them knew she could not afford to take: a flute, a good luck charm, Impa's favorite foods, extra boots, a book—why her mother thought she'd have time to read on a mission like this remained a mystery to her.

Link let Irma wrap him in the old cloak, fastening the bear tooth toggle buttons and closing the front. She stepped back, satisfied with the fit, and Link looked up at her, blue eyes wide, face halfway buried in the fur lining the cloak's neck. Impa couldn't help but smile at the sight of him, so pale and thin-looking in her father's old clothes, but still strangely natural. It seemed an adventurer's garments suited him somehow. Now, if she could discover that an adventurer's spirit suited him as well, they might be able to ascend Eldin and come back down alive.

"I suppose I ought to send word to Talporom," Impa's mother said, smile fading.

"Don't bother," Impa answered, lacing a pocket of the pack closed. "He'll only worry about me."

"He's your father, of course he'll worry about you. We all will."

Impa smiled cynically. "No matter how old I get, you never seem to stop fretting about me."

"I'll fret about you until I die, Impa. It's in my nature."

Impa glanced at the stableboy, sitting heavily cloaked in front of the fire. He had turned his head and now stared into the flames, silent as always. She wondered if he knew what was happening—he seemed remarkably untroubled by the ordeal, but perhaps it was only because he was not familiar with the ritual.

There were plenty of stories of Sheikah who ascended the mountain with earnest intent, but found themselves struck down regardless by the angry god-spirits. These tales circulated around the province, telling of wanderers lost in the storms of the giant mountain, frozen forever in the slope, and many more detailing the slaughter and subsequent devouring of travelers by the dozens of wolf packs that roamed the hills. Impa knew better than to believe such stories, but they lingered in the back of her mind, casting shadows on her hope and forcing her to pack an extra knife. She knew the likelihood of their return hinged mostly on the clemency of the weather. If the snows rolled in late, they would only have to consider the cliffs, falling rocks and wolves (a true Sheikah never worried about getting lost in the Eldin range—in fact, Impa remembered, elder Merel had once said a true Sheikah never got lost at all).

Impa wondered why the elder insisted they listen to the old gods. She was half-convinced they were long gone anyway—and so had nothing of value to say about Link. Impa knew at this point Merel wouldn't order his execution, but there was little chance of him actually joining their clan. He could not eavesdrop if he could not hear—he couldn't fight if he was not trained. He was nothing more than a burden on their people, but then again, technically, so was Impa's mother.

When Talporom had brought a Hylian woman back to the village after a mission to the southern provinces, the people of Kakariko reeled at the company. She was certainly not the first of her ethnicity to arrive in the village, she was not the first to stay, but in that state of racial and cultural unrest, it seemed nothing less than perfidy to bring her to the village. It hadn't been two years since the army from Lanayru began their invasion of Eldin and left unprecedented carnage in their wake—it was said that the Deadwood river, which flowed from the top of Death Mountain, had run for months not with water but blood. It had been Goron blood, Sheikah blood, that stained the riverbed and irrevocably scarred Eldin province. To bring a Hylian to the village was to pour salt into the open wounds of the tribe, but Talporom had earned such respect over the years, there was little open protest.

Talporom and Irma were married under the old gods' watch, with blessings from the village elder, of course, and she received her bridal tattoos. She retained her southern Hylian traditions—primarily raising the children, taking charge of the domestic duties of the household—but she had not been allowed to pass on those traditions to her daughters, who were, by the tribe's standards, still considered fully Sheikah.

And now Impa had brought her own Hylian. She had no intention of marrying him, but perhaps, if Merel would allow it, Link could stay with Irma, in the company of someone of his own race, his own culture. Irma was kind and patient, and despite already having two grown daughters, would still have room in her heart for a son of sorts. Of course, Impa could not openly ask her mother to take care of him—that struck her as akin to showing up at the door with a new pet and begging to keep it—she would have to wait until Irma offered.

It was also possible that she would never have to worry about her mother offering, especially if they never made it back down the mountain. Impa knew it was a minor problem for a later time—the gods were extinct, they would have nothing to say about him. She would come back down with him in tow, unchanged, unhindered, and hand him off to her mother before being reassigned to another task. When she no longer had him to worry about, she could start the search for royal blood all over again—it was her duty.

She solidified her plans in her mind as Link sat by the fire, wearing her father's old cloak. Her mother reemerged from the back room with an old knitted hat, green wool faded with age, and knelt before him. She smiled widely as she pulled the hat over his blond hair, tucking his slender ears into the fabric.

"This was the first hat I made your father," Irma said, without taking her eyes off the boy before her. "You can tell it's a first attempt."

"It looks quite silly on him," Impa admitted. The absurd shade of green and the pointed tip, the length of the hat and the way it fell over his back almost made her laugh. She tried to imagine what her mother was thinking—or intending—when she knotted the first stitches of that hideous thing. She tried to imagine her father's reaction to it, the kind yet credulous smile, the sincere but still pained words of gratitude. She wondered if Talporom ever wore it or if it had gone straight from Irma's hands to the storage shed.

Poor hat. It had not aged well—the creases and holes made it look almost as scraggly and unloved as the boy who wore it, but they suited one another, in a strange and pitiable way. He wore the hat like he wore all the other articles Irma had wrapped around him without his explicit consent: with a dignified resignation.

If only Impa could be so calm. She had tried for the past few days of preparation to keep her hands from shaking, to keep her face from contorting into a scowl, but she could not banish the worry from her soul. It constricted her throat, it made her breaths shallow and unsatisfying—even Link noticed her tenseness, and occasionally reached over and gripped her wrist, in order to (she guessed) comfort her.

It was a dangerous trip, especially at this time of year, but Merel had taken time to emerge from her cave and hobble her way down to Kakariko proper to give her some sage advice. Irma had answered the door for the elder and immediately placed tea in front of her, which she sipped contentedly.

"Your grandmother made the trip up to the mountain once," she said to Impa. "She did fine, and so will you. That said, I was her companion for that particular trip." She took a moment to grin and sip her tea. "Goddesses, did we learn about one another up there. It's astounding how much you reveal when you think you're about to die. It really does miracles for the bond of friendship."

Somehow that failed to comfort Impa. When Merel continued, it was in a more constructive vein. "You will no doubt meet any number of adversaries up there, animals, the elements, hunger, cold, yourselves, perhaps… but you must be careful which ones you trust and which you don't. It could mean the end of your life."

Impa did not know what Merel meant, but she nodded her head, blinking slowly, trying to dismantle and piece together the mysterious words of the wizened elder. Merel offered no explanation after that; she just sipped her tea and complemented Irma on her brewing. "You make it just like a proper Sheikah," she said, and Irma blushed slightly.

"You'd think after all these years I should be able to."

"And you'd be surprised at how many of us who were born here still can't."

While the two waxed poetic about the form and fullness of each tea leaf, each possible mode of steeping, Impa finished packing. She pulled the strings on the large bag, laced the leather closed, and hauled it onto her shoulder. She slumped under the weight, but it was nothing that she couldn't carry—or, at least, make Link carry while she navigated their way up the slopes and fought off any threats. Link still sat by the fire, eyes closed, wrapped in Talporom's old clothes. Impa set the pack down on the floor and knelt in front of him, touching him lightly on the knee. His eyes opened calmly and he watched her lips as she moved them, slowly.

 _We leave tomorrow. In the morning._

She wasn't sure if he understood. His eyes were soft and hazy, as if looking at something far beyond Impa, but he nodded his head anyway. She squeezed his shoulder and left him by the fire, staring into whatever it was that he saw deep in the flames.

* * *

For the first time in his life, Link held a conversation. Granted, it wasn't the sort of conversation that hovered in the air between two people, spurred by sound and gestures. But it was the first time an entity had told him something, and he'd had the power to answer back in his own words. They were formless words, abstract details of thought, but the fire had understood. There had been an exchange of ideas. And it baffled him.

Nights ago, when he sat between Impa and Palo in the old woman's cave, engulfed in the orange light of her sacred fire, he'd felt something itch in the back of his head. It scratched against his skull like the soft brush of a horse's tail, but it still made him twitch, made his heart flutter in surprise. When he drew his eyes away from the floor and back to the old woman sitting on the other side of the fire, he saw that she'd closed her eyes, instead preferring to let her fingers see what went on in the heat of the flames.

So he followed her touch. What little skin was close enough to the fire could feel the columns of heat and cool, dancing, forming images on his hands, on his face, in his mind.

He saw Talon, his worried countenance, his wringing, hairy hands as he looked fervently for his stableboy; he saw the fire-red mare, snorting and fidgeting in her stall, awaiting his usual rounds, hands full of carrot ends and apple cores; he saw the hounds and their untimely litters, curled in a warm pile of black fur and pink tongues, waiting for him. His heart sank, and his lungs seemed to shrink in his chest. A pang of longing made its way up from his belly to his constricted throat.

 _Do you want to go home?_ the fire asked.

 _Yes,_ he'd answered, in his mind. He hadn't taken the time to wonder why the images were speaking to him—all he cared about was getting the pain in his chest to leave him.

 _Then you must entreat the spirits to give it to you. But you must remember, it might not be what you expect. Home is not where you are from. It is merely where you belong._

 _I belong there_ , he answered, thinking of Talon's greasy cooking, the smell of the animals, the picture of the redheaded girl on the stable wall and the flickering of the mourning candle, filling the stalls with a warm glow all through the night.

 _We shall see._ The fire stilled, for a moment. _The old gods will tell you what you need to know about belonging._

Link had never met a god, but if they were anything like kings, he knew he had an obligation to heed them.

 _You will ascend Mount Eldin and present yourself to the ancient spirits. You will put yourself at their mercy and judgment. Then you will get to go home. Better yet, you will know where home is._

Link was fairly sure he knew, but he also knew better than to argue.

 _The old gods may not answer your entreaty, or they may answer with wrath and damnation. That is the risk you take._

Link gulped.

 _But you will not be alone. You may choose a guide, one of Sheikah blood, to lead you up the mountain._

Link had never heard of Sheikah blood, but he hoped Impa had at least a few drops flowing around in her veins. He silently reached over and touched her knee, hoping that he had chosen correctly.

 _Very well,_ the fire answered. It almost seemed amused. Link had a feeling that it wasn't really the fire that spoke to him, but the old woman who hovered over it, smiling slightly, eyes lazily shut as if in deep sleep. _You have chosen a wise, strong companion, child. I've no doubt she will guide you to the peak. Whether or not you survive the trials at the summit is an entirely different question._

The fire dimmed, casting a bluish, dying light over the room, and the old woman lowered her gnarled brown hands. The flames danced lazily, low and cool, as the woman stood, wrinkled smile spreading across her face.

When he closed his eyes, whether it was in the darkness of the night outside, or here in front of the fire in what he assumed to be Impa's home, he saw images, saw flames. He saw paintings and sculptures of things of his past—Talon, a pregnant grey cat, the barkeep's wife and her kind smile, the shining hooves of the warhorse, almost silver in cloudy light. He wanted to keep those images with him, but each time he glanced back at the fire, seeking the comfort of the familiar, the tableaux faded a little more, flickering back into grey ashes. He watched helplessly as scenes of his home vanished, swallowed in the flames. He knew in his heart the only way to bring them back was to let Impa lead him to the top of the gargantuan mountain whose shadow loomed over the village.

He took a moment to marvel at how in the course of a few weeks he had gone from shoveling manure in the King's stables to ascending a foreign peak with a tattooed stranger. He had always had a feeling that while he was isolated in his silent world, concerned only with the care of animals, there was a bigger realm outside the corral gates, outside the city, that he would never get to explore. He'd never particularly wanted to—he had all he needed right where he had been: safety, animal companionship, food, warmth, work. He harbored no concern for the that world, full of its clashes and dangers and confusions, saturated with the vibrations of conversations he'd never hear, full of deceit and nonsense. He knew Talon was the only human company he'd ever need, the only connection to the world full of those who did not have the time nor inclination to attempt to speak with him. Apart from the barkeep's wife, and of course, the yellow-haired girl, he'd had no other human friends.

But then there was Impa. There was something about her that forced him to reach over for her when the fire told him to choose a companion. There was a powerful, stern kindness in her eyes, a willingness to try to understand him when she could, a willingness to introduce him to that large world Talon had only sheltered him from. She had shown him the countryside, pointing to this and that and mouthing the words for them slowly, so he could get a grasp of what shape they were in his head. She had fed him strange foods, showed him the set of strings that quivered so delightfully in the light—she had even shown him a few moves with weaponry that only guards and noblemen in the city had even been allowed to touch.

He had a feeling that he had, in the presence of Impa and her strange, cold-eyed companion, acquired the beginnings of a taste for freedom. The part of him that desperately desired to make his way back into the King's stables was strong, and it ached in him like a burning pain, but what he really feared was not being barred from the King's palace because of his transgressions, not being captured and punished by the guards—what he truly feared was that he would not be able to force himself to stay. A dark, anxious twisting in his gut informed him that it might've been too late. He had dipped one toe into the raging, dangerous waters of the world, and sooner or later he would have to jump in.


	14. The Ascent of Eldin

"Said the wolf to the fawn, 'Have you ever seen teeth this sharp, or fur as silvery as mine?' 'No,' the fawn answered, and stepped closer, for indeed he had never seen such a shiny, beautiful coat, nor such a set of wonderful white teeth. 'Have you ever seen eyes this red, this lively?' the wolf asked. 'No,' again said the fawn, and took yet another step closer, for indeed he had never seen such eyes, so bright and wide. 'Have you ever seen claws as lovely black as mine?' 'No.' The fawn took another stride, and peered down at the claws, which were indeed black as night and glinting like stars. By this time the fawn was well within snapping distance of the wolf's slavering, strong jaws, but he did not close them around the creature's throat. Instead, he issued a warning: 'How easily you are enticed! Had I been something as lowly or tricky as a fox, you would be dead now, foolish child.' The wolf licked his chops, digging his claws into the soft dirt. 'But I am a wolf, a creature of honor, and therefore I shall have mercy on you. I will give you a running start.'"

Etran Olrani, "Tales from the Eldine Forests," from _Ordish Children's Stories_

* * *

The first night was clear and dry. There were no packs of roaming carnivores to be seen, no rumblings of the earth that would send pillars of rock crumbling down on them. Impa could not help but sigh in relief when they found a small outcropping of rock under which to make camp. She rolled out their small mats, sat herself down and pulled their dried dinner from the pack. She split the salted meat and hard bread and handed some over to Link, who ate it eagerly.

He had followed her closely all the way up the slope, almost like a loyal dog, without complaint. She quite liked the silence he brought with him—she had grown so used to Palo and his word games, his jokes, his idle conversation on the road, the stableboy's quietness struck her as refreshing. He proved himself tough as well, following her closely without stopping to rest. She had even burdened him with the pack, and he kept up, lost in his own thoughts and ignorant of his own exhaustion. He was wide-eyed, fascinated with the scenery around him, and even at night, he stared up at the stars, light unimpeded by the new moon, eyes gathering them like so many berries and storing the image away. It was likely he did not see the stars too often in the city—the smoke and lights of the town no doubt blotted them out.

Impa smiled as she chewed her dried meat. He would sleep well tonight, she could tell. She would have to keep herself up to watch over them both for a little while as the deeper darkness fell. She finished her measly dinner and pulled the wolfskins from the pack. She lay them across the mats, ushering Link inside his and wrapping him tight. He settled into the soft bed like a swaddled child, and drifted off before she had even finished closing the skins.

She sat back against the rocks, staring down at his sleeping face, lit almost blue by the expansive starlight. She sighed, scanning their surroundings for any sign of movement, of danger, but saw none. She lifted her nose to the air to see if she could sense any peril approaching from the far reaches of the woods, but all seemed quiet, save for the activity of a lone owl, prowling the forest for food. Impa stood up, tracing her way around their little camp, hand outstretched.

She erected a small barrier around them, woven of shadow and air, sealed with a rune and a quick incantation. It wasn't impenetrable, but it would at least warn her if something stepped over its bounds. Satisfied with her work, she tiptoed back to where Link snored slightly. She lay herself in her own skins, pulling the soft material tighter to her. She crossed her arms and closed her eyes, letting the last images she had of the village lull her into relaxation.

She saw her mother, hands clasped worriedly over her breast, as Impa and Link started up the side of the mountain—a route so untraveled there were no paths, no markers, to show the way. Palo had stood beside Talm, letting her hold onto his arm and squeeze it as she watched her sister walk away. The elder had waved, oracular smile on her face, and Irma couldn't help but rush after them to see them off for what Impa was fairly sure was the fifth or sixth time. She hugged her daughter tightly, spouting all the usual motherly nonsense about staying safe, then grasped Link on either side of the face and kissed his forehead. The look that crossed his face—the sheer bewilderment—still made Impa smile, wrapped up in her skins in the dark. Evidently nobody had kissed him before—and it was that image of Link, red-faced, eyes wide, green cap sitting askew on his messy head of hair, that lulled her to sleep.

* * *

Impa could only guess at the intensity of Link's apparent soreness. He followed behind her, letting out little groans with each step, panting with the effort. Evidently the carelessness of yesterday's hurried pace had caught up to him, and he no longer had the luxury of being distracted by every sight and smell of the deep forest. But Impa did not let him slow, she didn't let him stop. She could feel the peak above them, perhaps a little more than a day's walk away—they might've been able to get there before nightfall if the days were not so short this late in the year.

But there was no time for regret or bargaining—the clouds gathered above and Impa knew they had to hurry. She practically dragged Link up the slopes, barely slowing when the rocky scree turned into cliffs, and they had to clutch the mountain with both numbed hands and toes curled desperately in their boots. A distant howling spurred Impa on, and she climbed until neither of them could climb further. As the first flakes of snow fell across the mountain, gray and damp in the quickly fading light, Impa found a small cave in which to rest. She stumbled up the precarious incline, rocks slipping out from beneath her feet, and slowed when the slope lessened, easing into a short, flat area surrounded by small caves and boulders. She dragged Link to the nearest one and he collapsed in a panting heap of fur and splayed limbs.

Impa poked her head out of the cave just as the wind picked up, throwing sharp snowflakes like pinpricks into her face. They had long since passed Eldin's timberline, and the only life to be seen were a few scraggly lichens and, in the distance, a small herd of brave mountain goats descending the cliffs opposite them. She had no time to wonder why they had wandered so high up, nor offer them thoughts of hope as they fled the coming storm.

She crawled back into the cave, turning Link over and helping him remove the pack from his back. He tried to sit up, pushing himself desperately against the sloped wall of the small grotto, but he only slid back onto the rocky floor, red-faced with effort. Impa pulled their mats from the pack and unrolled them, helping him onto his before sitting on her own. She looked down at him, shivering, sore, curled up, and her heart sank. She wondered what the extent of his physical tasks were back at the palace stables, and if the arduous hike had broken past his limits. He seemed so pale, so desperately tired, and she wondered if he would be able to get up in the morning.

She pulled out some food for them both, and when darkness had fallen completely, and the wind outside had picked up to a harrowing scream, puffs of snow flying into their little cave, she lay down and closed her eyes. The cold seemed to seep into her very core, and she pulled the skins tighter around her, wiggling her feet, hoping some feeling might return to them before she drifted off. She heard the unmistakable chattering of teeth beside her, and reached over to Link.

In the oppressive dark, she could not see him, but she could tell he lay curled tightly, facing the opposite wall. He shivered so hard she could almost hear his bones rattle. Impa knew there was no chance of starting a fire on a night this cold and so far from the nearest tree, so she lay a hand on his shoulder. He stopped shaking for a moment, and Impa fumbled with his skins in the dark, pulling open his fur padding and adding her own to it. She lashed the furs together, as her father had taught to do on nights where the cold may sneak in and steal one's life while one slept. She pulled the skins tight around them both and pressed up next to him, turning over so her back lay against his. He seemed stunned at the contact, holding still and tense, but at least he wasn't shivering so hard anymore.

She lay next to him, feeling his breath relax, sensing him drift off to sleep. For some inexplicable reason, she felt her own heart quicken, halfway convinced that he could feel the fluttering vibrations of all her organs through the layers of their clothes. A tiny part of her feared he could tell what went on inside her—where her veins pumped and how fast, where her mind wandered. She told herself to calm down; where she could not convince herself to disbelieve Link had that kind of uncanny perception, she at least convinced herself he was asleep, and therefore not concerned with the status of her heartbeats.

She took a deep breath, letting their combined warmth relax her. She let it usher her from her waking body, let herself go limp, letting her eyes close and her mind drift off into dreams.

She was so tired she didn't realized she'd forgotten to set up a barrier.

* * *

When Impa awoke, Link was missing. A shiver ran through her as she turned, instinctively expecting the warmth of another body, but her arm passed through air, landing on the rapidly cooling furs that lay empty beside her. She bolted upright, eyes scanning the cave. He hadn't gone farther in—the throat of the cave closed only a few feet from where she lay, so he must have wandered out into the white, snowy day.

She had little time feel thankful they had survived until morning. She had little time to curse herself for allowing Link to get up and wander off without her noticing. Surely when he crossed her barrier he would've—then she remembered she hadn't erected a barrier. She mentally punished herself as she jumped out of the wolfskin blankets, crawling her way to the mouth of the cave and peering out into the featureless expanse of bright white beyond.

She called out into the morning, voice muffled in the rapidly falling snow. She knew it would do no good, so she gathered her cloak tighter around her and set off after him.

She imagined what the elder would say when she returned to Kakariko without him, when she came back empty-handed twice in a row. Impa knew the elder would cast her out, and rightfully so. She would have her tattoos cut right off her face, she would have the location of Kakariko wiped from her memory by force, she would never see her mother or father again, nor Talm, nor Palo…

She stumbled upon Link's tracks, fresh in the falling snow. She bent and followed the footprints, hurriedly, rushing along before the snow could bury them. She stumbled forward, shivering, teeth chattering without mercy, and swept across the snow, fresh and powdery and unconscionably cold. She composed all sorts of chastisements in her head, chastisements he would never hear. Then she decided the most communicative thing she could do was slap him across the back of the head. So she readied her hand, anger burning, when she made out the speck of his form through the whirling snow.

She slowed, only slightly, when the smudge of Link's form split into two black shadows, dark across the stark, infinite white snow. Something stood before Link, short and hunched, like an animal. Impa thought, for one insane moment, he might've come across a straggler of the Goron clan, but that hope died in her when she saw the thin bristles of fur on its back, the long snout, the triangular ears. The wolf sat calmly in the snow, unmoving before Link, dark as coal against the blizzard.

Impa drew her knives, throwing herself between Link and the wild animal. She looked into its red eyes, bright as fire, and raised her blade. She had never fought a beast of this regal nature before, but with a tinge of regret she realized she might have to kill it to save what she had, in the past few days, come to think of as some kind of ward.

But Link reached out and gripped her elbow, pulling her with a surprising amount of strength. She stepped back, regaining her balance, and glanced to him. He shook his head, still buried between a massive fur coat and an equally ill-fitting green hat. His blue eyes bored into her, almost demandingly. She turned back to the wolf and acquiesced, sheathing her knives and taking a deep breath.

Link approached the animal like he would a common hound. He held out his hand, not timidly, but not aggressively, and the wolf regarded it, prodding it with its nose and snorting slightly. White snow dotted its nostrils, its long eyebrows, giving it a dappled, almost domestic look. When the animal turned and trotted across the snow, Link followed, motioning for Impa to come along.

She hesitated for a moment, reasoning with herself. Their bag was back in the cave. They were ill-equipped for the journey ahead, and Link was gallivanting off on the heels of a wolf. She shook her head, telling herself it was his uncanny knack for animals that drew her to him in the first place, and cautiously followed behind.

The wolf did not lead them, as Impa suspected, to an ambush. She was not aware of any pack that had developed such methods of hunting—especially for use on mountaineers, but she couldn't quite shake the nagging suspicion that this wolf led them into something like a trap. She could not account for the sort of hyper-intelligence she attributed to this animal, except for that it somehow seemed to know where it was going. It trotted along purposefully, undeterred by the blizzard, occasionally glancing back over its bristling shoulder to make sure the two of them still followed.

This wolf was no ordinary wolf, and Link was no ordinary prey, following in the footsteps of a mere trickster. This was something else, something Impa could not quite explain. Still, she held onto the hilts of her knives, staying close to Link, until the wolf disappeared into the white haze. Impa's heart raced, pounding against her chest, but the wolf's head reappeared in the snow, red eyes shining like two beacons. As they drew closer, Impa realized the wolf had crawled into the safe passage between two rocky outcroppings, bleached white and hidden in the screaming snow. Link followed suit, reaching back to grasp Impa's wrist and pull her after him.

His determination and forcefulness surprised her. She stumbled into the safety of the rocks, shaking out her hood, and surveyed their surroundings. The stones were sharp and cold, forming the tall walls of a narrow passage. Above them glowed a blue-white sheet of ice, remnants of a glacier or other such formation, now hollow. It arced over them like the glass roof of a hallway, shielding them from the wind and snow.

The wolf sauntered onward, jumping and scrambling up the small shelves of rock that acted as stairs in this peculiar corridor—Impa was reminded of a temple dedicated to Nayru she'd once visited in Ferryman's Way. The nave of the sanctuary had been carved from white stone, the ceiling lined with windows tinted blue and glowing with holy light. It had been a beautiful sight, of course, but it had not instilled the same spiritual fervency in her that this simple corridor of ice and stone did. She did not believe in the daughters of Hylia, she didn't believe in many of the ancient gods her own people worshipped (though you'd be hard-pressed to get her to admit it to her fellow tribespeople), but she could believe in this, whatever it was. She could believe in this natural messenger, four-legged and jagged-toothed, leading them along the holy corridor, she could believe in the strange deaf boy in front of her, hands outstretched, climbing over the black rocks. She could believe in the voice of the blizzard above her, tearing across the ice, and she could believe the sharp stone beneath her fingers, supporting her as she ascended to the peak of Eldin.

Palo would laugh at her if he saw her now, blindly following a deaf boy, who in turn blindly followed a wild animal. He would laugh if she told him about the strange, overpowering sense of transcendence that came over her at that moment. He would laugh at her if she told him how desperately she wanted to ask Link how he did it, how he listened to the wolf and knew to follow. But Impa knew she would not tell Palo of any of this. She would not even tell Merel—as the peak of Eldin neared, and with it the proximity to the inexplicable, the indisputably supernatural, she felt something intangible wrap around her heart and throat. The mountain would not let her speak of this—and she had no desire to. She looked at Link up ahead, still fervently following the black wolf, and wondered if he experienced the same sort of strange, metaphysical pressure; she had to guess he did, since if he could hear the silent voices of wolves, he would most definitely sense the silent voice of Eldin.

The passage steepened, narrowed, and she and Link had to turn sideways to squeeze through the cracks in the mountainside. For a second Impa found herself thankful she had abandoned their supplies in the cave, since they wouldn't have been able to fit in these narrow rocky passages anyway. At least she might be able to find the cave again. She was certain, for a reason she could not explain, that she would never discover this particular corridor again, especially without animal guidance.

The wolf waited for them at the top of the steepest escarpment, black shape blocking the sharp blue light that pierced the ice ceiling above them. It sat and flicked its tail, bright red eyes watching them struggle up the vertical shaft, almost amused. Link pulled himself up the ledge and reached down to help Impa up after him, and when she glanced up into his face, he saw a slight smile cross his pale features.

 _What a strange creature_ , Impa thought as she hauled herself up next to him. She struggled to her feet, and the wolf, so near it left a trail of earthy mustiness in its wake, sauntered onward, toward a shadowy archway of rock. The structure reminded Impa of an open mouth, and it was with a good degree of caution that she stepped toward it, one hand on her knife. Link disappeared into the rocky maw first, seemingly untroubled, and she followed him, closing her eyes as she ducked through.

When she opened them again, she found herself in the thick of the blizzard. Snow stung her face and blurred her vision, but she walked onward, reaching out for the grey silhouette of Link in front of her. She stumbled through the snow, pulling her cloak tightly to herself and narrowing her eyes against the wind. The grey image of Link's outline became clearer in the storm, and she walked to his side, stopping to stare when a brief lull in the raging wind cleared her sightline for a moment.

The wolf was gone. She and Link stood alone at the mountain's summit, engulfed in a white cloud too high to be natural. Before them stood a stone temple, carved with intricacies and statues, tall black pillars rising to the white sky. It looked like nothing other than the shadow of a palace, but when Impa approached, slack-jawed and unaware of the snow filling her open mouth, she realized it was solid as anything.

She lay a hand on a pillar at the entrance to the temple. The black stone was warm, unbelievably reflective and composed of rare material not found on the mountain itself. She looked over at Link, who had taken off his gloves and was now touching the ornate carvings on the pillars eagerly. She reached over to him and tapped him, motioning to the entrance—a tall, curved doorway fit with two massive slabs of oak, untouched by the inclement weather and the flow of time. Impa approached the gargantuan doors, Link trotting up beside her, and took a deep breath. She lay her hands on the wood and pressed forward with all her strength.

She did not expect the door to give way so easily. But when they creaked open, hinges screaming louder than even the wind, white-blue light poured from the doorway and nearly blinded her. She looked over at Link, making sure he followed, and stepped inside.


	15. The God-Spirits of the Mountain

"I have seen my sisters born again in blood and fire, screaming like the desert wind itself, cursed and blessed by the old goddesses of the Gerudo. I have seen strangers reborn in silence, sculpted from ice and rock by the spirits of the stoic mountains. I have seen the dead rise and the lame walk. I have seen what the ancient deities can give—and I have seen what they can take away."

Obaru of the Haunted Waste

* * *

The air in the temple fell over them like a cool gust of breath. It felt alive, watchful, but somehow not quite sinister. Impa drew her knives anyway, scanning her surroundings for any sign of danger.

The building's entrance hall glinted like ice in the blue light, black pillars rising to the sloped roof. Tall, empty windows lined the walls, filtering the light in a multitude of bright colors, as if through panes of stained glass. The snow drifted in from their long arches in streaks of blue, purple, grey, reflecting the uncanny luminescence of the temple itself. Depictions of deities of light and shadow stood embossed, immortal, in the walls. They were strange to Impa; they were not the gods of her tribe, nor were they the deities of their old neighbors, the Gorons—or at least not any she'd read about.

Impa crept down the grand hall, Link beside her, and moved toward the altar at the chancel of the temple, under the curving murals of sky and storm. She could see a black dais glow in the light, round and intricately carved, untouched by time. Upon it sat something sharp and shining, and from where she stood, it seemed like a thin piece of scrap metal. She knew she should investigate it a little closer, but she was loath to approach the altar carelessly, especially when she recalled the stories other tribespeople had told her about the wrath of the gods of the mountain. She shuffled toward it, barely moving, waiting for the inevitable crack of a stone-built trap, or the whistle of arrows flying at her from crevices in the walls. But there were no traps sprung, no rush of falling stone as the building collapsed on her. The only thing she heard was Link's sudden exhale, the click of his boots on the floor as he stepped back. Impa turned toward the narthex of the ancient temple, following his blue gaze, and her eyes settled on their lupine guide, reclining on its haunches between them and the exit.

The wolf stared at them for a moment before padding toward them on large, silent black feet. It lowered its head, hackles rising, eyes glinting. Before Impa could throw herself between Link and the wolf, it sprang forward, claws outstretched, jaws open. She raised her knives and flung her arms toward the animal, but not before its front paws caught Link on the chest and he fell to the ground, struggling under the teeth that closed around his skin.

Impa sprang to his rescue, the tip of her blade sweeping through the air, but when it reached the wolf's bristly back, it bounced off harmlessly, ringing with the clang of metal on ice. Impa reeled, arm trembling at the unexpected impact, and regained her balance. The wolf did not seem to notice her strike—it latched onto Link's throat, growling, tail wagging eagerly.

Impa raised her knife for another blow, but before she could thrust the blade into the icy flank of the animal, she felt an uncomfortable pressure on her back. She tightened her muscles, squeezed the air out of her lungs, and ignored it, focusing instead on getting the wolf off her companion. But she couldn't even lower herself to pry him from the animal's jaws—the pressure on her back exploded into pain, and she cried out, dropping her knives.

The agony spread from her spine to her sternum in a thin line, forcing a gasp from her stinging lungs. She raised her hands to her chest, glancing down at herself. A thin blade of ice protruded from between her breasts, sharp and clear. Blood ran along it, dripping from her wound, staining the otherwise pristine ice a morbid red.

It always surprised her exactly how bright fresh blood was. It was garish, unseemly, against a backdrop of such calm, cool light. She watched it run along the length of the ice sticking from her chest, and her eyes dimmed. A drop of it gathered at the tip of the eldritch icicle, and in the fraction of a second it took for a tiny sphere to form and drop from the edge, a gust of wind nearly threw her off her feet. The white gale blinded her, carried her away from her pained consciousness and into a darker place. She never saw the drop of blood hit the floor.

* * *

When the wolf closed its jaws over Link's throat, he felt no fear. That's not to say he didn't feel pain—of course, an animal's bite draws agony like any other injury, but he had accepted the inevitability of this result since he took his first steps after the wolf in the freezing blizzard.

He knew it would come to this. He knew he would have to pay a high price to go home, to go back to the stable and the warm protection of Talon and the horses. The wolf's gaze said as much. It was not the kind, reasonable blinking of a hound, nor was it the hungry stare of a wild beast. The wolf looked at him with eyes much more than animal. The fire's words returned to him in that moment, the talk about gods and spirits, and he wondered if he had finally come across one.

He entreated the wolf as it sprang on him, claws digging into his chest, mouth closing around him. He asked it desperately to show him the way home.

 _The only way home is in death_ , it had answered.

 _Very well._

He wondered if his reluctant acceptance of the wolf's violence had surprised it. Suddenly, the animal was gone, and he found himself standing, picked up by a whirling gale so thick it almost felt solid. It was a chilling yet soothing wind, ruffling the fur on his coat and threatening to tear the hat off his head. The icy gusts blew away the pain in his throat, his chest, and when he reached up to touch his own skin, he found it solid and unhurt.

Two blue eyes appeared before him, lined with silvery fur. They hovered over him, each bigger than his own head, staring through the gale at him. They seemed to dig through him, turning him around and examining him, stripping him down and pulling him apart without moving. Behind the eyes, Link could make out the shape of a silver animal, its white claws curled under it. A long snout, tipped with a black nose, emerged from the gale and touched his chest. The gargantuan wolf sniffed him once, twice, and pricked its ears forward.

 _Are you willing to make the sacrifices necessary?_

He wasn't sure. _Yes_ , he answered.

 _You will bleed for this country, boy. You will suffer for it. But you will also be better for it._

Something soothing, some strange magic, entered his skin, chilling him to the bone. The wind died down a little, but something colder and more invasive replaced it, threatening to freeze his fingers and ears right off. There was a probing curiosity in that wind, and as it touched his skin, he could feel its doubts, its questions.

 _You are broken_ , said the wind in the wolf's eyes. _But a broken blade may yet draw blood._

 _Yes, I am broken_ , Link admitted. _I am missing one of my senses._

 _That is not what I speak of. Your ears do not function, but that does not mean you're broken. It's your heart, child. I can mend one, but not the other. The other you must heal yourself._

Link did not have the strength to ask the wolf what it meant. The wind picked up, pricking his skin with horrific precision, piercing his head, his eyes, soaring down his throat. He let loose a terrible, painful breath, gripping the edges of his coat as if to keep it from flying away. Something vibrated through him, shaking his core; he imagined himself crumbling apart, bone by bone, stripped of sinew and dismantled like a useless machine. He could not draw breath, he could not see, he couldn't even feel the wind on his skin anymore, couldn't smell the air around him.

Then everything stilled. His vision remained black, his senses empty, but a curious, periodic sensation crept through him. There was a compression of some sort, pounding through his head, similar to the tremblings he could feel through the floors and walls of a house, sometimes through the dirt or rock itself. But he did not touch anything—his skin was senseless and still. Yet the pounding continued, throbbing in his brain, and his ears twitched slightly.

He gripped at his chest, the pressure running through him in painful intervals. He begged for it to stop, to let him return to the stillness, but when he lay his hand across his breast, fingers pulsating in time with the throbbing, he realized, for the first time in his life, that he could hear the beat of his own heart.

* * *

Impa groaned, pulling herself to her knees, holding her pounding head. Her chest ached, her fingers were numb with cold, and it took all her strength to open her eyes. Blurry, blue light flooded her vision, and she slowly felt life return to her.

She struggled to her feet, suddenly remembering her injury, her pain, and the strange, gargantuan pair of blue eyes she swore belonged to a giant wolf of some kind. She gripped her forehead and looked down at her chest to see not a gaping hole, as she expected, but healthy skin under slightly ripped, bloodstained clothing. She sighed, lowering her hand from her aching forehead and looking around.

She saw no wolves. She saw no white, snow-laden wind, sharp and forceful. The two gargantuan blue eyes of the giant wolf had disappeared into the darkening air. There was only Link, kneeling in front of the altar, clutching his ears.

She trotted up to him, limping slightly from sheer exhaustion, and lay a hand on his shoulder. He jerked his head up, blue eyes boring into her. She almost stepped back in surprise at the intensity of his gaze. A few drops of blood still dotted his throat, running down the front of his coat, but his skin remained unbroken, his life firmly inside his own body.

"Impa," he said, and his eyes widened. He repeated her name, once, twice, slowly, faster again, until all the syllables merged into one incomprehensible slur of nonsense.

"Link," she answered, a little frightened at this sudden turn of his speech. When the name struck him he lit up, smiling. Impa narrowed her eyes and knelt beside him, examining him for any injuries. He seemed fine, just a little overexcited.

"Impa," he said again, smiling. He seemed eager, but unable, to move on from that word. He stood, making his way to the black dais and the shining altar that stood on it. Impa followed him, both intrigued and bewildered by his wide smile. As he bent over the altar and reached out for the shining scrap of metal that lay there, Impa had to stop herself from slapping his hand away.

Evidently the spirits of the mountain had found them worthy to live. They had a strange way of showing their approval, but she doubted they would kill them now, after they had survived what she assumed was some sort of trial by hallucinatory combat. Impa sighed, watching Link pluck the metal from the altar. He lifted it, examining its shining length, eyes wide. To Impa, it looked like a fragment of steel, perhaps a little bluer than most metals, but still a useless scrap.

Link stared into the metal, looking at his reflection. He stood deathly still for a second, gazing at nothing, before slamming the steel into the corner of the altar. Impa jumped, raising her hands instinctively at the harsh sound of metal clanging against stone. She eyed Link suspiciously, trying to pick out a cause of his sudden, odd behavior.

But he just stared at the vibrating metal in his hand before closing his eyes and lifting his head, smiling at… something.

It took Impa a second to figure it out. "You can hear," she said, quietly. Link's eyes darted to her, and he smiled widely. "You…" She laughed, smoothing back her hair from her eyes, and sighed in relief. "I can't believe it."

She clapped her hands, and he blinked, twitching his head instinctively away from the sound. She smiled, grabbed him by the collar, and examined his healthy grin, his content but confused stare. She shook her head and dropped him, taking a step back.

"Follow me," she told him. He obeyed, but whether it was through true understanding or simply recognition of intent, she didn't know. She led him out of the temple, back into the snowstorm, which had abated somewhat in the past few hours (or days; to Impa, her trial had seemed eternal and instant, as if time compressed at the peak of this inscrutable, godlike mountain). The oak door opened easily for them—Link jumped at the loud creak, then smiled at the strange vibrations, eyeing the door's black hinges as he walked past. He pulled his bloodstained cloak tighter around him as they entered the quieted drift of snowfall.

It was slow going. Link stopped to listen every once in a while, pricking his ears up at the slightest sound of a flake alighting on the bed of white. He would bend to the ground, listening to the crunch of his own boots in the snow, or raise his eyes to the sky when the cry of a wolf or fox pierced the air. Impa could only grip his wrist and lead him onward, past the infinite sounds and down the mountain.

It took her a little while to find their supplies again, but by that time the snow had relented. The entire mountain range lay covered in a puffy blanket of pure white, calm and silent. When she recovered their bags, the sun was falling fast in the west. She glanced down to the tree line, and up to the glowing gold sky, thick with clouds, and decided they probably had enough time to make it to below the tree line and build a fire. Impa knew they would risk getting caught in the dark, but the anticipation of warm flames pushed her on. She trotted onward, nearly sliding down the snowy rocks into the evergreen forest below. Link followed her, slipping down the incline, laughing, and then laughing harder at the sound of it. He chuckled until Impa skidded to a halt under the drooping branches of a massive cedar, and then followed her into safety, smile glowing.

Impa broke off a few of the drier, lower branches, piling them into a hole she quickly dug, trying to beat the rapidly setting sun. She managed to start a small fire well after it had crawled behind the distant hills and darkness swept over the mountains, but she took comfort in the fact she'd managed to light one at all. The smoke climbed through the branches and into the dark air, and Link leaned closer to the flames, listening to the crackling wood.

She held her hands out, warming them, before retrieving their dried meal from the pack and splitting it up.

"Thank you," Link mouthed, without sound. Impa wondered if he was trying the words on for size before committing to them.

"You're welcome," she answered.

He smiled and nodded before downing his bread and dried meat. He sat against the tree's great trunk, pressing his ear up against the bark. He closed his eyes, as if trying to listen to what went on inside, smiling every once in a while. Impa wondered if he could hear the woodpeckers sleeping inside, or the insects crawling along the veins of the organism. Maybe he heard the sap flow through the trunk. She had no idea.

"You can hear," she told him, barely drawing a sideways glance from him. He seemed much more interested in the tree. "You can hear, but can you understand?"

He looked at her, lifting his head away from the bark, and squinted.

She smiled a little, rubbing her hands together for warmth. "Say something," she said, exaggerating the movement of her lips.

"Impa," he answered.

"Something else." She motioned with her hands with as much detail as she could, hoping to get her point across. "Say something you've seen on others' lips. Just push air through while you mouth it. Hm… say something you see the other stablehands say a lot. Something common."

He closed his eyes for a moment, as if searching through his repertoire of possible words, thousands of lips and tongues moving in his head, before settling on one, one he'd seen pass through the mouths of the stablehands around him every day. "Shit," he said.

* * *

Impa did not know why the ancient gods felt the need to give Link his senses again. He was capable of learning, she would give him that, but he was at such a disadvantage regardless of his recent recovery of his hearing, she doubted he would be able to repay the spirits in any sort of meaningful way. If there was one thing Impa knew about spirits—and if not only from hearing it countless times from her elders—is that they were fair-minded. They did not present any endowments that had not been earned, or would be earned in the future.

It seemed the great wolf spirit had chosen to give only Link an advantage. Impa felt no different as she descended the mountain. She had no sudden strength, no inexplicable speed, no extra knowledge, no increased skill. She was as she always had been.

She supposed the spirits had found her worthy to live through the trial, but undeserving of anything more. She told herself it was childish and selfish to feel disappointment at that fact; she had witnessed a miracle and met a god. Not many other people, even of her own tribe, could boast of that (and technically, due to the inexplicable vow of silence imposed on her by the indomitable mountain, neither could she). She supposed that if she were to play a part in that miracle, that if Link should hear and speak, she might as well be the one to teach him. So every once in a while, on their way back down the mountain, she would point to something and mouth the words slowly, letting him hear the nuance in sound and tone of each word. He already had a surprising breadth of vocabulary—he could easily tell one thing from another just by reading her lips, but he had never had the opportunity to compose his own sentences, to address a person on his own terms. Impa concluded that even though he was demonstrably intelligent, he'd never had a teacher willing to put forth the effort to show him the rudimentary foundations of common conversation. After all, at the stables, they'd only needed him to work in silence, so they had no reason to bother.

Impa taught him as they descended. She knew he preferred to hold his ear to the ground and listen to the small sifts of worms struggling through the rapidly freezing dirt, listen to the wind brush across the snowy trees, the crunch of his own boots on the ground. He was a creature comfortable without words, preferring instead to tap Impa on the shoulder and motion when he had a question, or needed something. She told him to speak up, to let her know in words what he thought, but he'd often shake his head, blushing slightly, as if suddenly embarrassed by the prospect of hearing his own voice.

The whole trip down the mountain, a mercifully uneventful hike, Link kept reaching back and pulling the thin slab of metal from his pack, looking it over before striking it against his thigh and holding it up to his ear. The note it rang out was so deep Impa could not recognize it, although she could understand his pleasure at the pure sound. Her father had once gifted her a tuning fork for her harp, crafted in the Royal Conservatory of Music in the Capital, which she often would let ring next to her ear, even after her strings were pulled tight. It still sat in her mother's house, next to the fire, waiting to be used. She decided it would be the first thing she showed Link when she got home.

It would be good to play some music again. Usually, when she returned alive from a mission, she would immediately sit herself behind her harp strings and pluck loudly, proclaiming to both herself and the village that she had survived another adversary, solved another problem, completed another task. Regardless of the outcome of the mission—success, failure, or somewhere in between, she always comforted herself with the strums of the pure strings.

Link would be delighted, she was sure. She smiled to herself as the steep slope abated, and the plateau of Kakariko spread before her. She spied the chimneys spouting grey smoke in the afternoon light, and the yellow trees shudder in the winter wind. A few flakes of snow followed them down the hill, toward the village.

Impa could almost smell her mother's cooking.


	16. Temokai

"One of the most important words in the old Sheikah language, one that has survived to this day, is _temokai_ , which has several dozen meanings, if one wishes to get technical about it. It is the root basis for several Sheikah names, many turns of phrase (we shall discuss those in a later section), and plenty of dynamic descriptors. In its barest form, it means 'celebration' (see Appendix C for proper conjugation of the verb form), which usually confounds the introductory student. 'Why,' one asks, 'would a people known for its seriousness, its secretiveness, have such heavy weight put on a word like that?' And I answer, eager learners, despite outward appearances, when the Sheikah are among themselves, undisturbed by the prying eyes of the world, they love a good party."

Ernst Shad, _The Student's Companion to Lost Languages_

* * *

Impa stopped by the elder's cave first, before the commotion at her return got out of hand. She stepped into the shadowy abode, the old woman's perpetual fire burning warmly, and announced her presence. When the woman emerged from her chambers, long dress dragging against the stone floor, Impa bowed, Link following suit (properly this time).

Merel broke into a smile when she saw them arrive. She stepped up to them, not minding that they remained dirt-smeared, stinky and shivering from the trip, and bid them sit by the fire. Eagerly they took their places next to the flames, warming themselves, and the elder knelt across from them, folding her hands politely across her lap.

"I see you have returned," she said.

"We have," Impa answered. "And we have brought something with us." She motioned for Link to remove the scrap of metal from the pack, and he did, staring at it for a moment before handing it over. The elder examined it, tilting it against the fire's orange light, sagacious smile widening.

"This is an interesting specimen," she said. "If the boy does not mind, I will keep it in my chambers, to look at it further."

Impa turned to Link, and his eyes widened nervously. "Can she keep it?" she asked, slowly. She knew better than to ask loudly at this point.

Link nodded.

"I see he has gained something as well," the oracle said. "Well done." She shifted her weight, laying the silver steel beside her. "And you, Impa? Did you learn anything on the top of that mountain?"

"I… no," she admitted. "All I got from this adventure was that scrap of metal."

Merel shook her head. "The gods are mysterious, are they not?"

Impa glanced over at Link. "Yes. They are indeed."

* * *

Irma flung her arms around both of them when they arrived at her door, crying out nonsense about blizzards and early snows and wolves and bears. Her voice, muffled in Impa's shoulder as she tugged them both close to her, cracked and wavered with emotion. Link seemed taken aback by the woman's display of worry, but Impa had seen it many times before. Every time she returned alive from a mission or task, her mother was there, crying on her shoulder. Impa never failed to find it touching, but embarrassingly un-Sheikah.

Talm insisted they throw Link a gotten-well party. She dashed through the village, announcing the arrival of her sister from the heights of sacred Eldin, nearly screaming for a potluck, assigning roles and designating the locations of the fire pit and dancing circle before anyone could protest.

Irma, swept up in the hurricane of her daughter's excitement, started to cook a stew of ludicrous proportions. It might've fed the whole village at one point—if the village had been at its fullest. Now it would feed the town twice over with a heaping portion left. Impa herself was never terribly keen on wild fêtes, but Talm insisted there would be music, and lots of it, in honor of Link regaining his ears.

Impa did not have time to practice her harp—in fact, it lay untouched in the corner as she busied herself with unpacking. Talm had been quick—her mother already had the pots on the fire outside, utensils clanging like weapons in a battle. Link was not quite sure what was going on, but he enjoyed the smiles on Talm and Irma's faces, eyes brightening at the sounds of their voices.

"So, what was it like up there, at the spiritual peak of the world?" Talm asked, leaning over Impa as she unpacked.

"Well…" Impa's mouth closed of its own accord, and the strange silence of Eldin's summit fell over her. She thought of the pain of her trial, the piercing blue eyes of the wolf spirit, and she found herself physically incapable of saying anything about it. "It's… it's hard to breathe up there."

"Is that all? What else? What about the gods?"

"It's…" Again, her throat constricted, only allowing out the most banal of descriptions. "It's cold. It's cold and snowy."

"Goddesses above, you're boring," Talm said. She turned on Link, as if she could get any information from him. "How about you? You can hear me now, right? What was up there?"

Link only shook his head vigorously. He glanced over at Impa, a slight smile on his face, as if amused that even with his newfound powers of conversation, he could not speak of the temple on Eldin. Talm gave up prying any information from them, and instead turned to help her mother with the gigantic stew.

Night fell mercilessly fast. Impa did not have time to lie down, to rest, to practice her harp before the celebration. She barely could sponge herself down and change before Talm came rampaging through the house, demanding their presence at the village _temokai_.

"We have to get the fire up and burning," she said. "We have to help mother carry the stew out to the village center. We have to set up the instruments."

It was with a heavy sigh that Impa assisted her sister. She hauled the ridiculously large pot of stew, brought out the drums from the back, and piled logs onto the public fire pit as her sister set up her harp.

"It's remarkable how out of tune this little thing can get," Talm said, twisting the tuning peg, and strumming. She had a musical ear and could pluck out a few tunes on the harp, but she much preferred her flute, leaving the accompaniment to her big sister. It came to no one's surprise that Talm would choose a solo instrument.

Palo met them at the fire pit, arms crossed, watching Impa stoke the rising flames. "You're back," he said. Impa nearly jumped with the realization that she had not seen the man for days. Palo had such a ubiquitous presence, unassuming and almost arcane, it was difficult to notice if he was physically, mentally, or otherwise absent. Whenever she saw him, returning from an assignment, emerging from his tiny house by the graveyard, meeting her in a city halfway across the country for the first time in months, it was always as if he'd never left.

"Nice to see you survived without me," Impa told him, watching the flames lick at the darkening sky.

"It was difficult, I'll admit." He paused, looking over to Link, who was sitting at Impa's harp, Talm beside him, plucking mindlessly and with unabashed joy. Palo's eyes widened, and a rare, genuine smile passed over his face. "Well, I'll be damned. Look who can hear."

Link looked up at him, grinning. "Hello, Palo," he said.

Palo stepped back as if struck. "Er. Hi."

Link went back to strumming the harp nonsensically, under Talm's watchful eye ("Good, _very_ good, Link—you're a musical genius!"), as the rest of the village emerged from their homes and gathered around the firelight, talking and toting their own contributions to the feast.

Many of them knew better than to ask Impa about her ascent, unlike Talm. As far as Impa was aware, none of them had climbed Eldin themselves. The only other person Impa knew who had made the trip was the elder, who, seeing the fire dancing in the middle of the village, descended from her cave to join them. She sat at the fire's edge, in her element, wrinkled hands clasped together, and smiled as Irma dished out soup and bread.

It was a decidedly untraditional meal for a normally traditional feast. Usually, or at least was the case before Irma and her daughter commandeered the village's celebrations, each member of the village would sit cross-legged before the flames and pass around fresh bits of meat—trout caught from the river, raw venison shot that very day, legs of rabbit, wing of pheasant. No spice was allowed on the raw flesh during consumption, and everyone was to bow and thank the animals before consuming the meat. Only after they had tasted the raw and bleeding strips of flesh, as a reminder that their food did not come without the price of death, they were allowed to move onto seasoned dishes, stewed or steamed or fried above the fire. Piles of yams and wild berries, dried fruits and maize were par for the course, until Faronian cuisine had invaded the town.

Irma had changed the course of the village's diet somewhat when she brought some livestock up from Old Riko. Once dismissed as one of her many quirks, Irma's chickens and single, lonely goat provided her with enough tastes of her home to satisfy her. And although the Sheikah generally shunned the idea of domestication, Irma would find the tribe's children eager to pet her animals, curious to try their eggs and milk. And eventually, their parents and grandparents acclimatized to Irma's strange cooking, and even came to look forward to village celebrations, when she would no doubt dish up something exotic. She did not fail to deliver to the denizens of Kakariko: chicken stew seasoned with southern Hylian flair. Nobody thought to thank the chickens for their sacrifice, nor assumed their thanks was accepted, for even among barnyard fowl, Irma's chickens were surprisingly, even bewilderingly stupid—it was hard to tell if they knew whether or not they were still alive or already halfway into the soup.

The elder ate first. It was a tradition that even Irma could not override. Each villager was served according to his or her age, starting with the wizened oracle and ending with the newest addition to the tribe, a young girl sitting silently in the arms of her grandparents. Her mother and father were apparently away on one of many assignments, but would return shortly, if the spirits willed it.

Link seemed overwhelmed by the light and activity, and especially the attention. Plenty of villagers decided it would be in everyone's best interest if they looked him over and asked him questions. He just shook his head, smiling slightly, and chose to focus on his soup. Talm hovered over him like a protective mother hen, answering in his place.

"Yes, he _used_ to be deaf."

"I don't know how old he is."

"I think he's from the Capital. Impa, was he born in the Capital? How old is he, by the way? Who are his parents?"

Link wore the sisters like a shield against queries, instinctively scooting closer to Impa as the questions intensified. Impa just shrugged at each interrogation, answering simply with "I don't know" and "I don't see how that's pertinent." She could almost see Link relax as the topic of conversation moved from him to the forthcoming winter, the imminent migrations of plenty of different species, the latest they could harvest their potatoes, when Irma should bring her remaining chickens into the shed before the snowfall became too heavy.

It was idle, joyful conversation, and it seemed to tire Talm out. She sprang up after a short while, grabbing Link's wrists and dragging him up after her. She nodded toward the drums, and the more rhythmically inclined villagers struck up a beat. Link looked desperately over at Impa, eyes wide with fear, as Talm started to gyrate and stomp beside him.

"Dance, you idiot," she laughed, gripping his arms and pulling him after her, motioning to his feet. He took a moment to listen to the banging drums, to get the hang of the repetition. He tentatively moved his feet as the village watched, eager to see how a deaf man might learn to dance.

It did not surprise Impa to find out the beat came naturally to him. Once, when she was a young girl and Talm still an infant, her mother had brought her to see a famous dancer in Old Riko. Errachella was known throughout Hyrule as the land's greatest performer, a devotee of complex rhythm and nearly impossible choreography. She was an eloquent speaker, humorous and honest in her memoirs, but had only discovered music after she had been deafened by a childhood accident. She said she could feel the rhythm of the orchestra through the floor, and could follow the beats and vibrations of the low strings almost through her skin. She was one of Hyrule's most talented—well on her way to status as prima ballerina in the famous Royal Opera in the Capital, until a jealous lover cut her career short with a broken bottle and a butcher knife. Her grave still stood by the windmill, never devoid of roses.

Impa wondered if Link was indeed using his ears as they were intended, or had taken a page out of Errachella's book by instinct, instead preferring to use his soles to sense the rhythm of the songs. He seemed to understand he had to land on the balls of his feet as the deepest drum sounded, and Talm guided him through the steps of the dance, taking his hands and swinging him around.

Impa was not sure why her sister felt the need to celebrate so heartily, when it was her success and Link's recovery that warranted the feast in the first place. Had Impa not been the one who brought him to the peak of the mountain? Had she not been the one to rescue him from servitude, to suffer the spirits' judgment on his behalf? Was she not the one best suited to guide him through the steps of a Sheikah war dance?

She told herself that bitterness and resentment were traits of a petulant child, and forced herself to smile at the two of them. Talm swayed wildly, swinging her arms and laughing, and Link, though more reserved in his movements, seemed like he couldn't help the grin that spread from his mouth all the way through his body.

"Impa! Play us something on your harp!"

The words hit her like an alarm. She looked at her sister, smiling widely, and the expectant faces of the villagers around her. She did not know why her heart shrank at the prospect of playing, but she shrugged it off as a rare emergence of performance anxiety and pulled her harp between her knees.

The drums continued, spelling out an invitation for her to jump in and strum a melody. She took a deep breath, laying her hands on the strings, running the tips of her fingers down their taut lengths, waiting for the music to come. But instead of the usual tune, the quick chord, the familiar scale, a feeling rose from her stomach that set her hands shaking.

She realized, with a jolt of torturous embarrassment, she could not pluck a string. She sat dumbfounded at her own ineptitude, and her hands' refusal to do what they had done thousands of times before. Impa could play harp in her sleep—she could coax a melody out of anything, she could follow a beat easy as walking.

The drums continued pounding, the faces of her family and neighbors turned eagerly toward her, and she couldn't play.

She tried to sort through the possible explanations for her body's sudden refusal to do what it was told, what it was used to doing. She knew she had not forgotten—even if the muscles in her fingers had lost their memory, _she_ hadn't. She still knew which string was which and how they would sound in sequence, but thinking of bringing to life the melodies in her head made her stomach turn. Then it came to her in a wave of shame: she was afraid of her own music. Whatever had happened to her at the peak of the mountain had stilled her hands, barred her from plucking her instrument. She could not surmount the wall of dread that rose before her with each second she kept her hands on the strings.

She looked around, at the slightly confused faces of the villagers, at her sister, at Link, eagerly anticipating her melody. She gulped. "You know," she started with a transparent smile, "I think I'd rather dance."

Talm's eyes widened, then she laughed. "That's the spirit!" She gripped Link's arm tightly, pulling him toward her. "But you can't have him, he's my partner."

Impa nodded, pushing her harp aside and standing. The farther her hands were from the strings, the more relieved she felt. The ineffable dread in her died down, and she let the beat of the drums carry her feet into rhythmic steps, let her arms sway, let her breath become the smoky lick of the dancing flames. Somewhere around her, now on one side of her, now on the other, Talm and Link twisted and stomped. She let herself forget about her fear, forget about her harp, forget about the spirit at the peak of Eldin.

She must've lost herself for a while, wrapped in the movements of fire and music. By the time she stopped swaying, breathless but strangely refreshed, the fire had died down, the drummers were leaving the fireside one by one to return home or sit under the oak tree and smoke firegrass. Irma had retreated back to her domain, and someone was passing around a large jug of Old Riko whiskey.

Impa seated herself by her sister and Link, red-faced with either fatigue, firegrass or drunkenness. When she sat beside him, he leaned against her shoulder and yawned.

"The poor kid can't hold his liquor," Palo laughed, passing around a large pipe carved of bone and petrified wood. Impa took a puff, letting the smoke fill her, relax her muscles, and send a pleasant, tingling sensation through her veins. Her sister took the pipe from her and exchanged it for the bottle of whiskey. Impa took a sip and cringed, glancing over at Link on her shoulder, silent as usual.

Impa called it a night when Link slumped forward, eyes closed, and passed out on her lap. She and Talm dragged him up out of the cold dirt and toward their house, bidding farewell to the friends that still sat around the fire, smoking and laughing.

Impa, much to the protests of Talm, lay him in her own bed. He groaned, smiling, cheeks flushed as she pulled the wolfskins over him.

"Why does he have to sleep here?" Talm asked, eyes red and drooping from what Impa imagined was far too much firegrass. The little nuisance would pass out as soon as she hit the furs, she was sure.

"Because if he's in here you're unlikely to take advantage of him," she answered, half in jest.

"I would _never—"_

Impa pushed her sister toward her own room, and reluctantly, tiredly, she complied. She stumbled against the stone wall, groping her way along almost as if blind, until she collapsed into the piles of skins and wool blankets comprising what passed for a bed (Irma had once tried to get Talporom to give his daughters down mattresses, but that was where he had drawn the line—not for any cultural reasons, but because hauling them up the mountainside would've proven a monumentally annoying task).

When Talm was safely snoring facedown in her blankets, Impa checked on Link once more before creeping across the house, careful not to wake her light-sleeping mother, and slipping out the front door.

The center of the village was engulfed in a satisfied silence—the townsfolk had all gone home or found somewhere else to sleep, and the roaring fire had collapsed into smoldering ashes. The sweet smell of firegrass still permeated the air, mixed with the remaining fumes of the feast. Impa breathed deeply, letting her unsettling disquiet wash over her once again. She walked past the fire, into the shadows of the whispering trees dropping yellowed leaves across her path and in her wake. She crunched the dry remains of autumn under her feet, her breath dissipating white in the chilly air.

When she got to the graveyard, she found Palo where she expected. He sat atop his parents' grave, smoking a generous bowl of firegrass from his large white pipe. His eyes were closed, tattoos shining in the night, his mouth slightly open, forming the barest semblances of words. He brought the pipe to his lips and inhaled, lowered it, and brought it up again with the unconscious ease of blinking.

"How's the crowd tonight?" Impa asked.

"It's quiet around here," he answered, eyelids twitching slightly, tattoos scanning the night. "I might actually be able to get a decent sleep."

"That's good news."

Palo opened his eyes, passing her the pipe. She took it from him and breathed its flames deeply. "What about you?" he asked. "You want to tell me what's wrong?"

Impa remained silent, unsure of how to start.

"You danced tonight. You never dance. And you always come visit me when something's amiss."

She sighed. "The elder always said that gods and spirits are fickle, and they give and take as they please. I didn't think they would be so… direct." Palo sat silently, waiting for her to finish. "And now I…" She bit her lip, lost in her own sentences, her own thoughts. She could barely get the words out. "Palo, the spirits took it."

"Took what?"

"They took away my music."


	17. The Elder Bestows a Gift

"The tradition of music and arts in this country is old, diverse and incredibly rich. I can think of no culture in or around Hyrule that has not developed its own modes, its own scales, styles, and instruments: the guitars and heavy rhythms of the Gerudo; the deep, resonant drums of the Gorons, the odd vibrations of Zora lutes (which can only be heard properly if the listener is fully submerged); the flutes of Faron; the majestic orchestras of Ordona and the folk dances of Old Riko; and the Sheikah… well, only the goddesses know what the Sheikah play."

Leah Noma, conductor of Castletown Royal Choir

* * *

When Link sat up in the pile of skins, the haze of sleep fading behind him, he heard the floor creak under his weight, the wind scratch branches against the window, the quickness of his own breathing, and had to reassure himself that he was not still asleep. He was not sure if he would ever get used to the strange sensation of sounds flooding his mind. Each time, upon waking, it seemed a cacophony of meaninglessness, but after a few seconds of sitting still, ears twitching, he could separate the distant sway of trees, the creak of the house around him, the crackle of a fire on the other side of the building. He closed his eyes and tried to smell its distant warmth, the familiar carbonic scent of burning wood, smiling at the intermingled hints of grain and dried fruits—whatever Irma cooked above that fire would smell delightful in mere minutes.

Link sat up and pulled the skins off himself, stretching, yawning, then chuckling at his own strange noises. He glanced to his side and saw Impa, curled on the floor, wrapped in a single blanket. He pulled himself to his feet and lay his still-warm skins over her before making his way out of the small room into the main body of the house.

Irma stood over the fire, stirring spices into a grainy mixture, while Talm sat against the wall, arm laid across her forehead.

"Goddesses' love," she groaned. "Who let me drink that much last night?"

"You're a grown woman, Talm," her mother said, smiling slightly. "You can make your own choices."

"Next time, bring me home with you when you leave."

Irma laughed, then turned and spied Link emerging from behind the tapestry that concealed the hallway to the bedrooms. She waved him over to the pot and motioned for him to look inside, and he breathed in the lovely scent of grains and raisins, of cinnamon and chopped apples.

"It's porridge," Irma told him, and he nodded. "Did you eat this a lot when you lived in the Capital? Surely you ate much finer foods—the Capital is known for its delicacies."

Link only absorbed about half of what she'd said, mostly by watching her lips closely and matching the sounds to words he knew. He shook his head, unsure of how to tell her that for breakfast he mostly ate leftovers from the palace's feasts, and depending on the day, they could be anywhere from a few days to a week old. Squash, soft with rot, onions that had long since disintegrated into a soupy mixture, rock-hard bread—Link always avoided the meat if it had a strange smell to it. Sometimes Talon would spare him by feeding the slop to the pigs and making them both real breakfast—eggs pilfered from the palace henhouse, chopped spinach, and if Link was lucky, a mushroom or two.

Irma stared at him expectantly, and he swallowed. He sorted through the sounds he knew matched the words and sentiment in his head, and struggled to push them out. "I had onions," he answered. He took a second to think of what he'd say next, but Irma beat him to it.

"You poor thing! Onions, he says. You've never had a good porridge before?"

Link shook his head.

"Well you can have as many helpings as you like, dear, just seat yourself and wait awhile while I finish this."

As Link sat across from Talm, who did not seem to notice him, he crossed his legs and let the smell of breakfast fill him. He reminded himself more than once that this wasn't a dream, that he was surrounded by kind people who understood him (the thought nearly winded him every time), he was in a warm place where no one expected him to genuflect to passers-by, where they would serve him porridge, whatever that was.

A stirring behind him drew his gaze toward the bedrooms, and Impa emerged. As she ran her fingers through her short hair, stretching, thin and tall as a willow branch and equally as wondrous, Link thought perhaps, just perhaps, his home with its animals and smells and rules could wait just a few more days.

* * *

"What brings you to me at this late hour, child?"

The elder's fire glowed deeply, casting her wrinkles like wide black stripes against her skin. On her wizened forehead, the tattoo of the great eye of truth glowed uncannily in the light, casting its gaze down on Impa. She found it both intimidating and oddly comforting whenever she saw it—she knew perhaps one day, if she managed to reach old age, she might have it herself, superimposed on her already colored skin, the same way the elder's shone darkly atop her marks that distinguished her as a learned healer.

Impa wondered if she could heal her. She doubted it—the will of even the wisest elder bowed to the commands of the ancient god-spirits of the mountain.

She took a minute to think of what she could say to Merel. She crossed her legs and stared into the fire a moment before answering. "Elder Merel, I am sick."

"You certainly have seemed a bit out of sorts these past few days."

Impa lowered her eyes. "I don't know if it's merely because my mistakes at the Capital have caught up with me…" She thought of the young princess, her wan, dead face, and her heart sank. She hadn't had much time to think about the girl recently, with her trip back home, her ascent up Eldin, the _temokai_. Her harp remained unplayed in the corner of her house, but she had plenty of excuses for that: she was busy teaching Link how to speak properly, showing him how to use a sword, how to hold a bow—it was like being in the presence of a precocious child, eager and brilliant but remarkably unlearned.

The elder leaned forward, shadows of the fire dancing on her face. Her mere gaze ripped Impa away from her distracted thoughts, and she again focused on how she could tell the elder what she experienced in the recesses of her musical being.

"I'm not even sure if it is possible to tell you what is happening, given—"

"I have been to Eldin's peak as well, child. I know what lives up there. You can speak to me about it."

"I think… I think the spirits took something of mine when they gave Link back his hearing." The elder listened without expression. "I think they took my music." Merel stayed silent, frowning. "My guess is that they had to use something as a base on which to build his hearing, so they took a portion of mine."

"Can you still hear normally?"

"Yes. I can even hear music, I can hear beats and melodies, I just can't… respond."

"How so?"

"Whenever I put my hands on the harp strings, they start shaking. I go cold. I wait for a song that I know can come—I can hear it in my head, I know what to do, but I can't make myself play. I'm scared to play. It feels wrong."

The elder thought quietly for a moment. "Have you tried to play any other instruments?"

"Just Talm's flute, when she's not looking. And I have the same problem."

"Wait here, Impa." The elder struggled to her feet, shuffling away from the fire, toward the back of her cave. She disappeared into the darkness without a word, and Impa strained to hear the sound of Merel rummaging in the mysterious treasures piled up in the nooks and crannies of the place. Impa heard the creak of a chest opening and closing, she heard the old woman's feet against the uneven floor, and the small "aha" of having found what she sought. Merel returned to the fire, holding something smelling of wood and age.

When the elder raised it up to the light of the flames, Impa could see an arch of bluish wood, a set of dull, straight strings suspended from a bar of rusty metal. Merel handed the small lyre over to Impa, and it fell heavy in her hands. She held it against her shoulder, but she couldn't bring her hand up to touch the strings.

"Play it," said Merel.

"I can't."

"Just try."

Impa struggled to lay her fingers on the old strings, brown with age and disuse, and the familiar dread overtook her. She gulped, forcing her skin to touch the length of the strings, and something of a burning sensation coursed through her hands up to her elbows. Every joint of her twitching fingers ached, and she could not force herself to pluck them.

"Play."

"Elder, I cannot."

"What are you afraid of?"

"I don't know."

"Well, what do you feel?"

"I feel… faint of heart—"

" _How_ do you feel that way?"

Impa reeled at the harsh tone of her interrogation. "I don't know! I feel like there's something waiting in the notes, some sort of fire, something destructive, and if I pull a string it'll come out. I don't know what it is, but I know it's dangerous."

"You won't find out unless you play, Impa."

"I can't—"

"Pull your hand back, girl!"

"I—"

" _Play_!"

Overwhelmed by the elder's forceful command, Impa almost instinctively drew her hand back, fingers catching the strings of the small lyre. Her heart stopped for a moment when she saw what she'd done—when she saw the blur of vibrating strings, colored red with firelight.

For what seemed like whole seconds, Impa did not hear a sound. Then something bright, something more than a noise, something entirely unnatural, hit her in the gut like a hammer. Light poured from the strings, a blinding bluish-silver wave, and a harsh, alien sound with it. The noise was certainly not music—Impa was not wholly convinced it had come from any strings at all. With the sound came a rush of air, knocking the breath out of her and nearly blowing out the fire. Impa could hear the crumbling of stone as cracks crawled from the origin of the strange chord, up the walls of the cave, dust puffing from the crevices like spores. Impa swore she could feel her bones cracking and bending, her muscles tearing with light and sound, but she could not put the harp down, she could not even move.

In the flicker of the fire, and the dimming glow of the harp as the strings lost their color, settling back into a dull, rusty brown, Impa could make out the face of the elder, smiling almost mischievously. When her lungs unfroze, when the surprise and pain in her chest disintegrated and she could breathe again, she found herself almost yelling at her esteemed elder.

"What was _that_?" she asked, panting. She looked at the cracks in the walls and the dust gathering in piles at their bases. "Your walls, elder Merel."

"Don't worry about that, child," she replied, smiling her usual, wise smile. "Far worse has been done to this abode."

Impa set the lyre down next to her, leaning forward, brow furrowing. "What happened? Whose instrument is this?"

"It's yours now, I suppose, since there is no one else who can play it."

"What is it…" she looked down at the instrument, "what is it made of?"

"It's carved of sacred wood from the forests beyond Death Mountain. The strings are more of a mystery—legend says they're made of a goddess's hair, though whose hair depends on which oracle you ask."

"But how did you get it?"

"It's been in our tribe for a few generations before mine, at least. For the longest time it sat under the elders' care, wasting away in the shadows. Your grandfather tried his hand at it a few times. He was the best harpist I'd ever known, and he couldn't get it to make a sound. This—" the elder waved her hand, encompassing Impa, the harp, the cracks on the walls and the dying fire, "is a rare skill. I have never known anyone with it. It is only mentioned briefly in the ancient texts. And there is no teacher for you, I'm afraid."

Impa lowered her eyes, heart twisting. "I see."

"If accounts of my predecessors are correct, it is a powerful, beautiful form of magic. But I have no doubt you will be able to learn it. You always were a brilliant musician." The elder frowned slightly. "I believe the spirits gave you this skill when you ascended Eldin."

A feeling of dread took hold of her. "The old gods do not give gifts."

"They do not, Impa. Be warned, this is not a gift. The spirits will expect to be repaid for this loan of power."

Discomfort pinched Impa's stomach. "And how will I repay them?"

"However they see fit. Use that power to the best of your ability. Sometimes, that is enough. Sometimes that is all they ask for. But sometimes they take more. They measure debts on a scale we can neither see nor understand."

Impa took a moment to calm herself. "Why, elder? Why would the gods give me something like this? Why would they give Link his hearing back, and give us that scrap of metal?" She held her head. "I know they have a reputation for being capricious, but this seems… disproportionate."

"They never lend strength where they see unworthiness. Impa, you always insist you are not good enough—that you are too weak, too slow, too clumsy, too Hylian—and no matter what we tell you, you doubt us. We have gotten used to that." Impa hung her head, gritting her teeth. "But to say that this power is misplaced is to distrust, and disrespect, the old gods themselves. They bequeathed this to you because they thought you could use it." The old woman reached over, pulling a sleeve out of the flames' way, and rested it on her shoulder. "Do you wish to prove them wrong?"

"No," Impa admitted.

"Good. Now, take the lyre. Go practice your music."


	18. Link's Education

"Some say the Sheikah get their brown skin from the soil of Mount Eldin, and their red eyes from the wolves that wander its slopes. Some say the fire that sleeps inside the volcanoes has given them such eyes, and yet others say it is the blood spilled in their past, their legacy of war and slaughter, that manifests in their gazes. As a boy, I pondered this question thoroughly, and arriving at no answer, asked a Sheikah warrior passing through the city where he got his eyes. He answered, 'From my mother.'"

Sir Yaerin of House Elanor, Royal Chevalier

* * *

Link didn't think of home, or the yellow-haired girl, for merciful weeks. The snow fell in earnest, blanketing Kakariko in thick white mounds. He loved the way everything sounded in the snowy banks, under the thickened skies: the clang of weaponry as he and Impa practiced swordplay, Talm's never-ending cascade of words and meanings, the crunch of boots in snow, Palo's sharp, deep voice absorbed by the wide flakes. It was so different than the snow of the wet city, where the traffic trampled the pristine white sheets into mud. Everything had a soft feel to it, dampening the stabbing cold that swept through the village with the snows.

He spent the majority of the winter inside, under Talm and Impa's watchful eyes, turning pages in Hylian texts, writing in shaky letters his own name again and again, mouthing proper words for concepts and objects with which he was familiar, guessing with ones he was not. He exchanged dull-bladed sword swipes with the sisters, let Palo slap his elbow into the proper place when he drew a bow ("Honestly, Link, do you _like_ having a bruise there?"), he let Irma show him how to make an egg slide off the pan with just enough liquid yolk (she was especially delighted when he brought the chickens inside just in time for the first snow—and then seemingly simply by living in proximity to them, made them lay twice a day). He worked miracles with Irma's misanthropic goat, even pacified an angry, lone wolverine that had wandered into their village simply by throwing it a pinecone. He was an entertaining, welcome anomaly in the village, from his easy smile, his unusual concision, his sinistral tendencies and utter naïveté. The townsfolk would sometimes gather to see Impa, Talm, or Palo beat him into the ground, shaking their heads in silent wonderment at the grown man who had never learned to hold his own in a fight. For the first while, even the children could best him.

But he improved. Slowly, surely, he started to land more blows, execute parries with success; he learned to take hits, to give them out, before he learned to sidestep a swipe altogether. He learned to throw a knife (badly), he learned to sneak through the shadows (mediocrely), he learned to kick a man off his feet (better), he learned to shoot a bow (surprisingly well).

Impa learned with him. She spent her time, when not showing him words or the flash of her practice blade, plucking at the enigmatic lyre she'd received from the elder. The noises that emanated from the dark strings were sometimes harsh, sometimes enticing, but always strange. The first time Impa had strummed the instrument in the house, one rogue overtone rang so loud it knocked her mother's favorite chair straight into the wall, snapping it in half. She practiced outside after that, or in the safety of the small animal shed, where the worst she did was puff hay out of the hens' beds and send them scattering, panicked, into the chilly yard.

When Impa played, bare-handed in the winter cold, it was usually safe to stand a fair distance away and listen. Sometimes when she ran her fingers across the dull strings, the instrument would light up, sending waves of power, forceful as a gale, from the glowing notes. Sometimes the harp produced lethargic, almost piteous tunes that left anyone who heard it on edge. Sometimes it would make no noise at all.

That lyre once managed to put the entire village to sleep. Impa had sat under the needles of evergreens, shielded from the snow, and strummed, vibrations of the languid song forcing the branches to shudder off sheets of white. Link had barely noticed her music wafting harmlessly from the direction of the graveyard, and then he woke up, facedown in the snow, in the dark. He stumbled back into Irma's house to find her and her younger daughter asleep at the table. He walked back out into the night, awoke Palo, whom he found sitting passed out by his front door, and together they hauled Impa, limp and snoring under the fir tree, back into her home. They rescued her harp before the cold warped it permanently, and no one who fainted outdoors caught frostbite, so the situation had not ended in total disaster. Still, Impa carefully modified that particular tune, changing a note here and there, altering it so that only animals felt its soporific effect. It also worked quite well on restless children, which, to some members of the village, was something of a godsend. When little ones cried or misbehaved, Impa was summoned, and happy for the extra practice, she would send the children off into sleep within the first musical phrase.

Link would've liked to learn the harp, have Impa show him a few ditties on her magical lyre, but when he tried to pluck its strings, no sound emerged from the instrument. She couldn't even show him songs on her old harp, since she found herself physically incapable of playing it. When he asked her why, she only said it was the price she paid for having the power to play her new one. What came from those strings was rarely recognizable as what one would traditionally think of as music, but he still enjoyed listening to her, nonsensical as the sounds were. That was when he was not busy learning other things.

The way he ate knowledge like a starving man astounded even him, for he had always considered himself at least ignorant, if not completely unintelligent. But he seemed to be catching on to what the others taught him, sometimes slowly, sometimes remarkably fast.

Talm tried to teach him to disguise himself as she did, showing him her extensive cosmetics. She administered them so deftly it seemed as if she could remove her own face and apply a second, equally convincing one in its place. Disguise was a lauded skill in the Sheikah community—but Talm most often used it to make her eyes look bigger, her lashes longer, and her lips fuller. Link did not know whom she was trying to impress with her beauty, but he figured whoever the man was, he must be shallow and callous as to not notice Talm without her augmenting her natural appeal. When he told her his thoughts, she laughed heartily.

Link loved it when others laughed. He loved it when they spoke eagerly amongst themselves, taking no notice of him standing by, absorbing every word. He listened to everything, intently, noting every phrase he understood and memorizing those he didn't. He repeated the story of each day's events to himself at night, trying to drown out the sounds of the wind through branches, of owls and wolves, foxes and deer, hooting, howling, screeching, scrambling through the darkness.

He learned to endure the subtleties of Impa and Talm's sisterhood—he could only interpret their interactions when he realized they behaved toward one another much like sibling pups in the stable. The only difference was that they preferred to nip at one another with words and gestures rather than teeth and muzzles. They never brought him into it, preferring instead to sharpen their teeth on one another's replies—a habit for which Link was grateful.

He thought about his home less and less as the weeks wore on. He had little room in his head for memories and regret, since he filled it to the brim with information about his new surroundings: how to hold a bow, how to fight, which snow-covered evergreen was which. He became proficient in the art of writing and rewriting his own name, sidestepping a swipe, and, hardest of all, reading the subtleties of Palo's expressions to tell when he was joking and when he was serious.

Despite his cryptic mien, and his odd, subtle intonations that sometimes left Link confused to his meaning, Palo occasionally stepped in for Impa as his guide to this strange new world. When Impa was lost in her otherworldly lyre, when Talm's frantic eagerness became too much for him, he would fall into Palo's shadow. The older man didn't seem to mind—he spent a good amount of his day talking to himself anyway; when Link hovered around him, not much had changed. He murmured as he whittled his arrows, sharpened his sword, picked his teeth—always talking softly, as if he could convince himself he was never alone by maintaining constant sound. Link did not mind; his new ears were sharp, and he could make out some wisdom in Palo's incoherent mutterings. Palo spoke enough for the both of them, so he felt no pressure to pipe up when the man was close.

Link noticed he'd even begun to smell like him—given that most of his clothes were Palo's teenaged garments, worn with use, it didn't surprise him. It seemed his collection of vestments consisted of either Palo's old clothes, or tabards and coats Talporom hadn't worn since his own youth. Irma set to mending the majority of them, but they still sported endless rips, tears, threadbare patches and stains. Link was only delighted to finally claim ownership of clothes at all, no matter how old and how worn.

The first time he'd received clothing, a few days after he and Impa had returned from Eldin, he'd been afraid to wear them. He folded them lovingly and set them beside the makeshift bed Irma had made for him in the back of the house, but remained in his shabby, torn clothes he'd worn nearly every day back home in the Capital for nearly a week after. When Irma asked him if he didn't like the garments she'd mended for him, he backed into a corner, refusing to speak should he say something that may upset her.

Fortunately for him, Impa was there to answer for him. "Mother, have you smelled him? He's afraid he'll soil them just by wearing them." She glanced over at Link, and he gave her a thankful look. He was not sure if she'd guessed correctly as to the reason for his hesitance, since he wasn't so sure himself, but when Irma looked him in the eyes, he could only nod.

So Irma called for Palo to take him to the communal bathing springs; evidently merely wiping himself off with a cloth wetted from Irma's pot could not wash the stink off him. "He might be more comfortable with Palo than with one of you," Irma had said to her daughters, and Link didn't know what she meant.

The steep path up to the springs wound its way opposite the elder's abode, gnarled tree roots and jagged rocks supplying the steps in those precarious stairs. As Palo led him up the slope, Link caught his foot in the crevices of the path so many times the man decided he was better off carried. So they arrived at the hot springs with Link atop Palo's back, red-faced and mortified, toes aching with so many stubs.

Fortunately, the steaming black spring was empty when Palo finally set him down on its rocky banks. Link smiled and took off his boots, sticking his feet in the warm water.

"Well, aren't you going to come inside?" Palo asked, removing nearly all of his clothes in what looked like one fluid motion.

Link pursed his lips in indecision. Back at the stables, the best wash he could ask for was to spray himself down with the same tepid water used to clean the animals and their stalls. He'd never had anything resembling an actual bath before, much less one with a bathing partner, especially not one like Palo.

The Sheikah removed the last of his garments and slid into the spring with a sigh. He sank up to his dark, scarred shoulders, steam coursing through his shock of bright hair. He turned in the water, glancing back up at Link with a credulous half-smile.

"You're going to get cold just sitting there," he said. He lifted his finger to the sky. "It's about to snow."

Link knew that. He could sense the gathering winds, the clouds billowing above him. He could smell a cold scent that was not quite rain creeping across the mountainside. Still, he just dangled his feet in the water, shaking his head.

Palo broke into a grin. "If you like, I can turn around until you're all the way in." Palo shifted to face the jagged cliff that overhung the spring, lowering himself down to his neck. "There, now you can be naked all you want."

Link looked behind him, making sure no one was wandering up the slope that might catch a glimpse of him undressing. He nearly ripped off his clothes in a hurry to get to the safety of the dark water, and had barely struggled out of his shirt before he was already in, sinking into the steam.

His toes touched the rocky bottom, and the hot water seemed to seep through his skin and enter his veins, warming him to the core. He could almost feel the water draw the stress from his muscles as he sank deeper into the heat. He closed his eyes and sighed heavily.

He almost forgot he wasn't alone. When Palo turned around, splashing lightly, he snapped his eyes open and immediately turned red, averting his gaze. It seemed strange to him to be in such close company with another person, especially in his condition. He slipped into the corner of the pool, safely wedged between two large rocks, and sat in silence.

"You're a shy one, aren't you?" Palo asked, splashing a stream of hot water across his dark face, rubbing it into his tattooed skin. "But it's how we do things around here, so if you're going to stay, you might as well get used to it." When Link didn't emerge from his hiding place, Palo shook his head. "Gods, kid, I'm not going to violate you. I'm not interested."

With Palo's deep, honest laugh, Link found the courage to slip from behind his rocks and sit in the water freely. He sank until the water touched his chin, his white skin glowing underneath like a beacon.

He was suddenly very aware of the mark on his shoulder. In the city, he'd worn that mark with pride, as a pass into the palace grounds, or as security to travel from one end of the city to the other, for anyone marked as property of the King was of at least some inherent monetary worth. If anyone gave him trouble, all he had to do was tug at his loose collar to show that there would be repercussions of damaging the King's property.

But here, in the isolated and somewhat insular Sheikah village, it only marked him as an outsider. He found himself raising a hand to cover it when he spied Palo's eyes wander to his shoulder. Link prepared himself for the inevitable question.

"So, how did you come into service of the King?" He picked up Palo's meaning from merely anticipating the query.

Link shook his head.

"You don't know?"

Link shrugged, composing his reply carefully. "I don't... I don't remember."

"So, you were born in the stables?"

"Maybe."

Palo turned his body in the water, breathing the steam deeply. He leaned back against the rocks, sighing. "So you've known nothing else."

"No." Link leaned back, stretching his legs and looking at his toes poking out of the water. "T-Talon took care of me." It was the first time he'd heard the name aloud, and the syllables echoed strangely across the rocks. Palo didn't seem to notice his stutter. He draped his steaming arms across the edge of the spring and stared into the white clouds, twitching at a rogue snowflake alighting on the tip of his nose.

Link sat a while in silence, before daring to venture out into unsolicited conversation. "P… Palo," he nearly whispered, and the man turned his red gaze from the clouds, boring instead into Link's rapidly blushing face. "I wonder… if I can go back." He did not mention that the fire in the elder's home had been the one to tell him he had some chance of going home.

"To the King's stables?" Palo smirked. "Why in all hell would you want to do that?"

Link shook his head, sinking deeper into the water, berating himself for asking a stupid question.

Palo just sighed. "They'll kill you if you show your face there again."

Link waited a while, composing his thoughts and choosing his words meticulously before speaking. "The King might have mercy—"

"An interesting prospect, kid. But in order to beg clemency, you're going to have to get granted an audience with him. Do you know how hard that is?"

Link wasn't even sure what Palo meant; the words he used were strange to him.

"It takes months. Then you're going to have to plead your case. And pardon my frankness, but you're not the most eloquent of young men. The only way to prove your innocence is to attest to our guilt. Mine and Impa's."

Link did not know much about guilt. But he did know that Impa had run rampant through the King's private grounds, she'd destroyed his property; although, he had nothing to do with that, he was just following her. "But…" He lost his words in his throat, and Palo picked up the broken pieces of his conversation.

"You think it was an accident, don't you? Some sort of misunderstanding." There was no malice in Palo's face, only a sort of harsh comprehension. "Well, it wasn't."

Link's heart sank. He knew there was some sort of connection between the King and his new Sheikah companions that he'd been unable to decipher—if not only because he hadn't had the faculty to ask them until recently. He spent a few seconds preparing his next question carefully, but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was a pathetic, "Why?"

"Why?" Palo seemed amused at the question. "Where to start? I suppose I could tell you about—" He stopped abruptly, long ears twitching, and he narrowed one eye. Link turned his attention from interpreting Palo's strange words to listening to his surroundings. He could make out the slight, expert shuffling of feet against rock, and images of danger flashed across his vision.

He quickly flung himself toward the edge of the spring, grasping the rocks and making to pull himself out, but Palo was there, hand on his shoulder, holding him in. "Don't reward her for this behavior," he said, and Link slid back into the water, confused.

Palo pulled himself out of the water up to his waist, turning his gaze to the rocks above them, half-obscured in the low snow-clouds. "You can come down, you know," he called up the shallow cliffs. "This is your hot spring, too."

A small shadow emerged from behind a rock, black against the snowy sky. Link squinted, and made out the shape of a thick bun sitting atop a long-eared head, and a pair of mischievous red eyes. Talm pulled herself into full sight, springing from the top of the rocks, soaring through the air and landing gracefully at the pool's edge. She crossed her arms, pouting.

"Where's the fun in that? There's gotta be some mystery in my life, Palo. Some _taboo_." Her eyes wandered to Link and he sank deeper into the water, reddening.

"Get out of here, Talm. He's not an item for you to ogle."

"Oh, lay off. Get a sense of humor."

With an evil grin Palo emerged from the spring, steam rolling off his dark skin, and firmly planting both his feet wide apart on the rocks, spread his arms and flexed. "Drink your fill, Talm," he laughed.

She groaned, averting her eyes and turning on her heels, back toward the village. "Fine, I get it," she said. "Neither of you are any fun." She disappeared back down the path, leaving Palo shivering naked in the cold snow. When he slipped back into the spring, he laughed loudly, wiping one eye.

"You can't make compromises with that girl," he said to Link. "Always remember that."

With Palo's chuckles and the periodic shaking of his head, Link knew whatever thread of conversation he had woven had been lost.

He washed himself in silence, occasionally finding himself smiling at Palo's unabashed boldness, before dressing and making his own way back down to Kakariko.

* * *

Over the passing weeks, Link learned to push the stables, Talon, and the city, to the very back of his mind, but he could not forget the yellow-haired girl. Occasionally glimpses of her came to him, sometimes when he closed his eyes to sink into dreamless sleep, sometimes when he stared into the flames of Irma's generous fireplace, trying to converse with it in silence, the same way he had conversed with the elder's fire. Sometimes, always in vain, he would try to wrestle answers from the flames as to why, after all the promises, it turned out he could not go home after all. No answer came.

When the time for the winter festival rolled around, he sat himself on the roof of Irma's house and stared to the west, wondering if the city was lit up with the lights of the celebration, or if the King himself had made an appearance that year. He knew he was too far away to see the smoke of the city's factories, to see the lights and hear the music of the parade, but he stared anyway, gazing into the bright, starry sky, under which he was sure the city was thriving and thronging without him. His heart ached to think of the festival—especially since now, for the first time in his life, he'd be able to hear its sounds, dance to the music of its parades.

He shared a pipe with Impa and Palo, staring across the mountains in the dead of night. They had wrapped themselves in layers of deerskin and wool, and cleared some of the snow off Irma's roof before sitting on it to watch the winter stars turn slowly above them.

"Did the elder tell you about Balras?" Impa asked Palo.

"Yes. Good riddance to him, I say."

"Who's Balras?" Link asked, coughing a little before handing the pipe back over to Impa.

"When you were hurt, after you fell into the moat, we took you to a doctor. We thought he would heal you, but he tried to kill you instead."

Link's mouth contorted in confusion. "Why?"

"He thought you had royal blood."

"Oh." Link knew there was a story in there he'd have to pick apart later. He had become quite adept at cataloguing subtext and backgrounds of stories and conversations, and saving them in his head to think about at night, when the hoots of owls and the wind through bare trees kept him awake.

"The elder sent Sheim down to take care of him. And take care of him he did." Palo brought the pipe to his lips and shook his head. "Have you ever worked with that man, Impa?"

"No, but my father has."

"He's the fastest assassin I've ever met. He can dispatch a man without anyone noticing—sometimes, it seems, not even himself. Balras didn't stand a chance."

"Of course he didn't. But you have to wonder which factions he'd informed about us before we silenced him."

"I'm pretty sure Sheim is still in the city, cleaning up the doctor's mess."

Link listened intently, picking out meaning where he could, and committing the incomprehensible parts to memory.

Impa hugged her knees, sighing. "I only hope that when my father gets word of this, he won't be too upset."

"Have you ever seen Talporom upset?"

"Of course I have. I'm his daughter—he might not look it, but I can tell when he's unsettled."

Palo took a puff. "Goddesses bless you, you and your mother are the only ones who can."

Impa smiled, took the pipe from him, and they settled into a comfortable silence, dragging it out for a few minutes, before the distant thoughts of the city and the winter festival forced Link to open his mouth. He did not know where he got the courage, but he decided that in this wide silence, he could ask them a sensitive question that had been itching in the back of his mind since he had left the Capital.

"What was her name?"

"Whose?" Impa asked, but the coldness in her voice told him she knew to whom he referred.

"The girl from the Capital. The one with the lacy dress."

Palo deferred to Impa, preferring to occupy his mouth with the pipe rather than with answers.

"We… we were never sure," she replied, lowering her eyes.

"You never asked her?" Link could not hide the disappointment in his voice.

"I didn't actually meet her face-to-face until we broke her out of that room in the palace. I was a little distracted at the time."

"The most we knew before then—" Palo paused abruptly to exhale his lungful of smoke. "We knew her father's name and heritage. He was originally the one we were planning to… well, kidnap, to be honest. We learned he had a daughter well after we learned about his blood. Apparently he secreted her away."

"Why?" Link asked. He wanted to know her place in all this, at least so he could know why she had to die.

"I don't know. Maybe he was overprotective; maybe he knew about his birthright and wanted to keep her safe. Maybe she was sickly."

"She wasn't sickly," Impa said. "She had fortitude. She ran fast, and she was smart enough to obey my instructions when I gave them."

"What happened to her father?" Link asked, almost afraid of the answer.

"The royal guard killed him. Sacked his house, stole his daughter."

"But… why?" He didn't want to learn that his snooping around their house had drawn the eye of the royal guard.

"Rumor had it that he harbored some… antiestablishment sentiments," Palo continued, passing the pipe to Impa. "He could've been arrested for speaking too loudly about the wrong things. That might also explain why he would hide his daughter away—he didn't want her mixed up in his political efforts. He didn't want anyone knowing about her."

"Or, worse yet, the King could've known the same thing we did," Impa put in. "He could've known about her heritage."

"You keep saying that. What heritage? What _is_ heritage?"

"Oh boy," Palo laughed. "If we start with that now, it's gonna be a long night." He took one last puff from the pipe and released the smoke, white and heavy, into the winter air. "It's quiet tonight; I'm gonna get some rest while I can. I'll see you around." He slipped off the roof and sauntered back toward his tiny hut, cold and dark, into the shadows of the trees that surrounded the village's graveyard.

"Why does he say that sometimes?" Link asked. "It's always loud."

"For you, maybe," Impa said. "You haven't learned to drown out the noises of the night yet. Others can, except for Palo, usually. But they're not the same sounds you hear."

Link gave her an inquisitive look.

"Link, do you ever wonder why Palo's tattoos are so strange?"

He shook his head. "Just as strange as yours."

"To you, perhaps. Each of us has tattoos that we earn through skills or gifts—for instance, my father and elder Merel both have the marks of healers, because that's what they do best. Merel has an extra marking because she's our leader, our chieftain." Link nodded comprehension. "Palo's what we call a deadseer. He can see, hear, and sometimes speak with, the dead."

"You mean… like a person in the ground?" Link could see his confusion almost made her smile.

"No, not their corpse. Not their physical body." She paused for a moment. "You know how, when you climb up to the cliffs beyond the village and yell, you hear the echo of your words come back to you after a few seconds?"

"Yes," he said, delighted at the mere thought.

"Well, death can have an echo like that, and Palo is the only one who can listen to it. He can see it, too. When he closes his eyes, the lenses of truth help him look into those remnants of lives. Like a spyglass."

"What's a spyglass?"

"Never mind. The point is, sometimes the dead are restless, sometimes they're quiet. When they're active, they make such a ruckus in his head he can't sleep."

Link thought for a moment. "Is that why he sleeps with his eyes open? So he doesn't have to look through his tattoos?"

"That's right." Impa smiled, white breath condensing in the cold. "You know nothing about anything, but retain some of the strangest details."

"When we left the city, I woke up and saw him—it was the stare of a dog before it bites."

Impa laughed. "Except Palo barks more than he bites. You've nothing to fret about."

He tried to laugh with her, but he couldn't help but think of Palo's strange sight, and about what he would say to the dead, if only he had the chance.


	19. The Winter Festival

"Many students insist that the great histories of Hyrule are too long, propagandistic, and unpalatably boring. These students, of course, have never read the true account of the rise of this great nation; it is an engrossing story, to say the least, but what strikes me as odd is that these young scholars, so fond of lustful poetry and gruesome retellings of violence, do not realize that there is no fiction nor verse more savage, scandalous, blood-soaked or beautiful than the history of our own country."

Lady Ronia of the House of Faron, from _A Treatise on Education_

* * *

In Link's mind, there existed two wholly separate Impas. They shared the same face, but Link learned to differentiate between the Impa at home, in the sight of her mother and sister, austere but kind-hearted and generous, and Impa in the element of darkness, the woman he had met in the King's palace. She had a light in her eyes that exhilarated and frightened him, and in those moments when he spied her wearing her warrior's countenance, he could only feel relief that she meant him no harm. Even when they stood as opponents in the sparring ground, she maintained her gentle sternness that cast no fear into him—only the determination to better himself. But when assigned a task, especially one with the weight of import, Impa's face would darken with resolve, and she would once again resemble the staunch, uncompromising warrior he had encountered in the palace, unconcerned with the obstacles that stood between her and her goal.

When Irma had asked them to secure venison for the winter festival's feast (Link learned the Sheikah had their own, less extravagant festival to celebrate the advent of a new spring), Impa had bowed ceremoniously, much to the amusement of her mother, and adopted the determined, unstoppable look of the warrior. She had walked to the wall and removed the family's hunting bow, but before she could sling it over her shoulder and disappear into the flurry of morning snow, Irma stepped forward.

"You should take Link with you," she said, drawing the young man out of his fire-warmed torpor.

As Impa gave her mother a stern look, he pulled himself to his feet, stretching away his lethargy. He would've rather slept the entire day away in dreamlessness, but when Irma even suggested he get to work, he had to acquiesce. She combed his hair, taught him to mend, and, being the only other Hylian in the village, taught him aspects of his own culture and people that he had never known about. Besides the barkeep's wife, with her occasional acts of kindness, Irma was the closest thing to a motherly figure he'd ever encountered. He could not say no to her.

So he bundled up, tucking his ears into Talporom's old green cap, grabbed his own bow, and followed Impa out into the snow.

They scoured the mountainside for hours in complete silence. Impa wore her determination like a mask, and Link followed noiselessly, much like he had when she first rescued him from their prison cell in the King's palace. They marched through the snow, light on their feet like Impa taught him, slipping from trunk to trunk between the massive trees, listening for any sign of animal life.

When Impa knelt in the shadow of a drooping spruce and removed an arrow from her quiver, Link dropped beside her, nocking his own. He stared into the grey shadows of the forest, squinting until he saw the slow, delicate march of a doe, brown hairs quivering in the cold, dotted with snowflakes. When Impa drew her bowstring, sounding only the slightest creak, the deer's gaze shot toward them, black eyes wide. She stilled, leg muscles clenching, tail flicking.

Link recognized the look in the doe's eyes, understood the fear and longing in her stance, and his stomach twisted. Before he thought his actions through, he lay a hand on Impa's arm. The look she gave him could've torn him apart, but she lowered her arrow. Link shook his head, unable to offer an explanation for his interruption of the hunt. Impa redirected her gaze to the deer, now fully aware of their presence and eager to leave it.

As the animal sprang across the snow, twin fawns, late-born and too thin, jumped after her, still spotted with the coats of their youth. The siblings stumbled through the snow after their mother, tripping over their lanky legs, powdery white clouds in their wake.

Impa lowered her bow and stood, watching them leave. Her gaze softened, and the dark determination in her eyes faded. When she glanced down at Link, it was not with frustration, or anger, but with an understanding resignation. That was the first time he had been able to coax her out of her warrior's mask in the midst of conflict. He had hoped it wouldn't be the last.

Hours later, they brought home the carcass of an elderly boar, too slow to outrun them. Having lived to the fullest its years would permit, Link thought he had few qualms about loosing his arrow into the old animal's back, but when it struggled to flee, its haunches dragging through the snow and leaving a blood-smeared trail, his heart stopped for a moment in horror. The only animals he'd seen die at the stables were the chickens, and even then, he avoided watching the axe fall through their twitching necks.

Impa knelt beside the boar and ended it quickly, sliding her knife across its throat, but Link stood back, trying to hide his aversion. When she tied the boar's legs to a long branch and asked him to help her sling it over their shoulders, he knew she could see him swallow the rocky lump in his throat. As they hoisted the animal up, a fresh gush of blood pouring from the wound as gravity gripped the creature's swinging corpse, Impa assured him they would thank the animal later for its sacrifice.

When Irma asked them why they'd returned to the village with the wrong game to be butchered for the festival, Impa told her, so straight-faced that even for a few seconds Link fell for the lie, that they did not come across any deer on their hunt.

"Ah, well," Irma replied. "It seems breaking tradition is a habit of ours. Let the butchers do their work regardless. We will still have a pleasant festival."

Impa did not mention Link's indiscretion again. She merely retreated to the flames of her mother's hearth, removing her gloves and warming her hands. Link sat beside her, thankful for her silence. He knew the warrior Impa would think him weak for his reluctance to kill something as pathetic as an elderly boar, but he was not so sure of the other Impa. She was merciful, compassionate, but still strong. He did not ask that Impa what she thought of his shortcomings. He was afraid to learn the answer.

* * *

Link learned plenty of things in the week before the festival. Talm took him to the woods and showed him how to fell a tree, how to chop wood into sizes decent enough for the celebration's bonfire, how to stack and carry them. He learned of the traditions and delicacies of the Sheikah version of the festival as they walked back to the village, wood slung across his back like a pack mule.

He also learned that for the third year in a row, Impa and Talm's father would not be coming home. The letter arrived a few days before the festival's commencement, carried in the fist of a Sheikah messenger. It had been written in code (for reasons Link did not quite know), but after deciphering it and spreading it out before the fireplace, Irma read it to them. Link had the feeling it may have been important, so he committed it to memory.

 _Dearest wife, dearest daughters,_

 _The situation in western Faron is thorny, to say the least. Consequently, I am needed here, both as a representative of the nation of Eldin and for reconnaissance. From what we've gathered, it seems the King has turned his eye back to his ancestral homeland. We expect the announcement of his march to ring from the Capital any day now. While this comes as no surprise to anyone, we still find ourselves ill-prepared for this circumstance. He will likely make his way southwest through Lanayru and arrive in Silk within the next few months. So I will be marching to the desert myself very shortly. I wish you a good winter, for I imagine I shall not see one flake of snow during mine._

 _And Impa: after receiving word of your ascent of Eldin, I appointed a temporary replacement for my post and packed my things, desperate to see you come home, only to have a messenger hawk drop word of your safe return into my eager hands half a day later. I hope you will forgive me for missing the ritual. I long to see you all and wish you well._

 _Talporom_

Half of the letter's contents escaped Link's comprehension, but he recognized a few places: Eldin, where he resided now, and Lanayru, land of the Capital, where he came from. He did not recognize what Talporom had meant by the desert, and he did not know what business the man had with the King.

His ignorance was not lost on Impa. In the quiet days before the festival, when all was still save for the smells and sounds of preparation for the feast, Impa led him across the village to the elder's abode, where she secured permission to enter the eastern caverns. Merel stood in the doorway and watched Impa carefully light the room's many torches, located deep in the fireproof stone. Merel smiled at Link's stunned frown as inch by inch, the library lit up before him.

The wealth of the tribe's knowledge sat stacked to the arced ceiling of that tall cave, books, scrolls, artifacts and maps piled high, stuffed into pine shelves and nooks and crannies of the intricately carved stone walls. Impa wasted no time pushing him into a wolfskin cushion and plunging him into stories that, according to her, were common knowledge (though he'd never heard any of them before). As the hours wore on, Impa guided him through the narratives, taking over when he failed to decipher words or meanings.

It was the first time he'd learned the nature of the old royal family. He had always viewed the King's blood as eternal, and had never considered there had been others seated on his throne before him—some pretenders, some, apparently, granted the divine right to rule by the gods themselves. That sacred blood which flowed through the kings of old, the sole, true bearers of the crown, did not run through the King himself, according to the texts. Frankly, Link had a difficult time believing it. No one seemed more suited to the throne than that colossal man.

There were some brief mentions of goddesses and golden powers that he made Impa skip through, preferring instead to linger on portraits of the queens and princesses of the old family, each bearing different but striking likenesses to the yellow-haired girl he'd met all those months ago.

The texts insisted that this family alone could bear the burden of power, except, apparently, when more than a century ago, a guerrilla faction from the desert swept across Faron, burning all in its wake, screaming toward Lanayru's capital—then called Castletown (or Castleton, depending on the text, Impa told him).

Hundreds of accounts—poetry, songs, historical records, common myth—illustrated the Conqueror King's ride through the forests and valleys of his new kingdom. All fascinated Link, and each had their unique adaptations of what was now a tale so steeped in legend there could really be no truthful account. One version insisted the Conqueror King Ganond had been a giant—a literal giant—dwarfing his company of Gerudo warriors and mercenaries, and no horse was big enough to carry him except for a steed summoned from hell itself, fire-maned and strong enough to rend the earth with a stomp of its hoof. Another account told of his unstoppable, ineffable black magic, gifted to him by the snake goddesses of the desert—some said this fiendish thaumaturgy was the only way he'd managed to depose the previous king. Yet others said the old king deferred to him peacefully and abdicated his throne to this rebel from the desert, awed by his power and stature. In any event, when the invader finally seated himself on the throne of Hyrule, he gathered the conquered lands of Faron and Lanayru in his embrace and unified them under his own banner, blessed by Hylia herself (said the scholars).

Impa read the accounts with a degree of distain Link could not understand. He loved the glory, the excitement, of it all, he liked to imagine the King himself, astride the red warhorse Link had trained for him, charging through the distant fields of Lanayru like wildfire. Sometimes in these images, Link was beside him, standard-bearer, knight, general, finest swordsman in the land, reveling in the speed and glory of the march.

A few days after Impa had first sat him down with the stories (they returned to the library each morning, if they were not needed elsewhere), after she had reiterated seemingly dozens of different narratives depicting the Conqueror King's first ride into Hyrule, he made the mistake of mentioning his admiration. She immediately slammed the dusty tome shut and leaned over him, red eyes shining like an angry wolf. "You think it was _good_ , what he did? Slaughtering the royal family, placing himself on their throne?"

"I-I'm sorry," Link stuttered. Impa did not notice he had avoided answering her question.

"Remember what his men did to your friend—remember what they did to _you_ , Link. The Dragmire family is ruthless."

An image of the King appeared in his mind, throwing him a gold coin, smiling at the elegance of the red warhorse. But he also remembered the royal guard, remembered the pain of the arrow as it tore through his flesh, the horror of watching his friend clutch at the shaft that pierced her throat. That had not been the King, though—it was his general who issued the order. If the King had been there, surely he would've spared them both.

Impa shook her head, accepting his silence as contrition, and reopened the book. The legend of Mandrag Ganond unfolded again in Link's mind, with all of its splendor, but Impa's disapproval discolored his imaginings somewhat. He thought of the great Conqueror King in a veil of secrecy, hiding his smile whenever he saw a depiction of his exploits: the corybantic ride through Faron, the long siege and ultimate destruction of Castletown, the triumphant northern march to the site where the new King would build his palace. The deposed king's own ministers coronated him on the ruins of the old family's castle, and he brought those ministers and palace guards, townspeople and workers with him when he established the nation's new Capital. One account told of the slaves he brought with him, thousands upon thousands, all branded with a mark that no Hyrulean scholar could interpret. Consensus among linguists was that it was a lost form of Gerudo writing, a way to designate caste, but no one was quite sure.

Link's hand instinctively wandered to his own mark, sitting harmlessly beneath his leather tunic. He had always worn it with some degree of pride; not only could he pull the collar of his shirt down to get back into the palace grounds—no other peasants but the King's own servants could do that—but it worked as a warning to others to leave him in peace. He'd once seen a group of men try to rob one of the other servants—a well-dressed, well-fed man, probably a doorkeeper—until they ripped his sleeve and spied his brand. They scattered like insects, afraid of the consequences of damaging the King's possession. Link almost smiled at the memory.

"Are you all right?" Impa asked him, pausing after the paragraph describing the palace servants' markings. "You look a bit pale."

"I'm fine," he replied.

Her eyes glanced to where his brand sat under his clothes, lingering there for a moment, before she continued.

Construction of the King's palace began shortly after his victory, drawing architects from all over the nation, eager to build a home worthy of its new King (or so the texts declared; Impa told him to accept all these narratives with a healthy degree of doubt, since many of the writers were royalists, paid by the King, or simply afraid to dissent—"You saw what happens to those who dissent," Impa reminded him, forcing him to think of the yellow-haired girl's sacked house, her broken possessions, her dead father). The monarch's new palace sprouted three great black towers, each built big enough to house a fraction of the royal family's greatest treasure, a power so great to merely speak of it was a from of treason.

"What power is that?" Link asked.

"The golden power of the gods," Impa answered. "There are three of them, three sacred parts, each a pyramid of light. The King has at least two; but probably all of them. Either way, he knows better than to bring them together at once, so each resides in a separate tower."

"I saw one of them, I think," Link said. "In the palace… she and I…"

Impa nodded. "I suspected as much. That power was her birthright. It belonged to her. It comes as no surprise it would draw her to it."

Link lowered his eyes, trying to remember the overwhelming power that stole breath from his lungs. He could only recall a vague halo of golden light, and a feeling of strange inevitability, before the guard burst through the door and destroyed the moment. He motioned for Impa to continue, quelling the uncomfortable feeling in his stomach.

Despite the tone of celebration with which almost all of the texts recounted the new King's ascension, not every province delighted in his newly claimed power. A long and harrowing schism of provinces fractured the country, fraught with skirmishes, betrayals and embargoes, after which both Ordona and Eldin managed to secure autonomy. By the time the hardship ended, Ganond's daughter Garona, first queen of her family's reign, had risen to handle the situation of diplomacy. She was well-known for her stern fairness, her dedication to propriety, and, according to more than one account, her resplendent beauty. She allowed Ordon and Eldin (and a smattering of lesser, weaker provinces who had joined the secession), to maintain their sovereignty, at least in name. In later decades, smaller provinces would rejoin the nation of Hyrule, seeking the crown's protection against bands of marauders that terrorized the plains and forests of the north.

Link did not know how long had passed when Impa finished listing the inconsequential bureaucracies of the small provinces. He leaned his hand against his open palm, trying to force his eyes to remain open, but since the Conqueror King and all the excitement his story entailed had disappeared from the narrative, he could not help slipping into a state of torpor. Saturated with information, he sighed, eyelids fluttering.

Talm saved him. Impa, unconcerned with the passing hours, talked on until her sister appeared in the doorway, arm-in-arm with the esteemed elder, smiling and shaking her head.

"Are you trying to ruin his festival day, sister?" Talm asked, her bright voice dragging Link out of his half-sleep.

Impa's eyes widened—there were no clocks nor windows to mark the passage of time in that cozy, rocky library, so to her it had crept by unheeded. Link, however, was not ignorant of the arduousness of those dragging hours, and nearly cried out with joy when Talm announced it was time for the village to gather under the stone arc of the elder's hall and begin the feast.

As the four of them made their way out of the library, Link could hear a faint echo of music, distant and lively. They reached the mouth of the cave, and the song rang louder in the starry, freezing night. A procession of torches appeared, lighting up the shrunken, shadowy distance of the village and dancing up the hill, joining into a parade like streams of red water feeding into a river. The beating of drums punctuated the lively chants of the villagers as everyone marched up the slope to the elder's house.

Each family brought their own contribution to the feast, much like they had during Talm's _temokai_ , giving the gifts of food to the gods and their neighbors. Thousands of smells followed the lively music—meats, spices, fragrant syrups and savory pastes—as the village carried their offerings up to the elder's abode.

Irma, assisted by Palo, supported one end of a massive metal dish, on which the butchered boar lay, basted in fats and spices, a ring of boiled fruits surrounding the dark meat. She marched up to the mouth of the cave, coming to a halt with the rest of the village, proudly holding up her contribution.

The elder bid the village sit around her fire, which she coaxed to massive proportions merely with a wave of her thin, frail hand. The fire rose up to the joy of the villagers, each brown face brightened with the yellow flames.

The elder stood, and though her eyes hovered level to most of the others' shoulders, she commanded the attention of the entire village without a word. They seated themselves around her fire, laying down their offerings, and crossed their legs. Talm and Impa sat at Merel's side, motioning for Link to do the same.

"Welcome, friends," the elder started. Her voice, though soft, rang puzzlingly strong along the stone walls. "Yet another year has passed, and despite the efforts of the world at large, we are still here."

Some tribesmen laughed, others cheered, yet others stared into the fire, brows furrowed.

"But now is the time we forget about worldly troubles, and concern ourselves instead with the otherworldly." She paused, lowering her eyes to the flames, a thin smile on her lips. "Although I am saddened to say that Talporom shall not be returning to the village for this year's festival—" (a wave of disappointment spread almost visibly through the seated denizens)—"his daughter has volunteered to be this year's spirit vessel for us. Wish her the best."

The old woman removed a small box from the infinite folds of her long robe and gently handed it to Talm. She took it, and with much grace and more ceremony, knelt before the fire, laying the case before her. She ran her fingers along the intricate designs inlaid in the wood for a moment before opening it up, face brightening at the contents. Link leaned a little over Impa's shoulder to better see what made Talm smile, and saw a collection of powders, paints and brushes. The contents of the box resembled Talm's own personal accumulation of cosmetics, but the colors of the creams were darker, seemingly older and thicker, although Link could not make out the exact composition of the paints.

Talm extended a long, brownish finger into a small tub of red powder, dabbing its tip before applying it conservatively to her own face. It was not a large amount—just enough to cover her own tattoos. She ran her finger in two large streaks under her eyes, tracing perfectly the outlines of her markings, tilting up her cheekbones and arriving in a point at the edges of her eyebrows. She dipped her finger into the powder once more before painting it down the thick stripe of red on her chin.

Done with that color, she took the clean finger of her opposite hand and reached into an open jar of bluish liquid, hovering her nail over the surface of the weird cream as if afraid to extract too much. She secured a tiny drop of the stuff on the tip of her finger and withdrew her hand with something of relief. She slowly brought her finger to her forehead and let the drop of oily blue stick to the smooth skin between her eyebrows.

A chorus of chanting rose from the Sheikah tribe, subdued but deliberate. Talm stood slowly, eyes rapidly glazing with the light of the fire, like she was looking far into the distance, unconcerned with the circle of tribesmen surrounding her. A few brown hands beat quietly on the sides of drums, fingers tapping like rain.

Link scooted closer to Impa as the chants rose louder. She turned her head slightly, and without taking her attention from the incantations that passed through her lips, gave him a reassuring look. He calmed, but couldn't help but wonder if the distinctive rituals of the Sheikah would ever not be strange to him. He glanced to Irma—even she mouthed the ancient words, watching her daughter with pride.

Talm stretched her arms and curled them again, stepping forward and back like a reed swaying in the wind, eyes wide and dull. She stepped around the fire, sometimes crouching, sometimes leaping. Her body seemed to take on a will of its own, exercising power over itself without Talm's knowledge or control. Link knew the movements of all his companions, he knew their body language better than their voices, and this wild, dreamlike dancer was not Talm. It had to be something else entirely, reaching down from another plane and moving her body.

The fire's gray smoke darkened, thickening into a green haze, flames licking up blue and purple under it. The smells of ash and wood thickened, overpowering the scents of the still-warm food. Talm's motions quickened, her muscles tensed and relaxed, sweat reflecting the dark colors of the blaze. Her limbs waved with the fire, and soon Link could not tell where the flames ended and Talm began. She seemed to have ceased to be Talm and had become the fire itself.

With Talm burning brightly, her arms and legs luminescent in the strange glowing smoke, the chanting crescendoed, fingers tapping more forcefully on the drums, the beats echoing faster and faster around the cavern. Link's eyes watered in the smoke, and he found it left a bittersweet taste in his mouth when he breathed it in. The sounds of the chanting and drumming reverberated around the chamber so forcefully they saturated his ears, and he almost reached up to cover them when, with an unnatural suddenness, the chamber quieted.

Shapes began to emerge from the smoke. Where Talm drew her hand across the flames, the green air congealed, twisting around itself with a seemingly life-like purpose. The ash and embers solidified, darkening into shadows, then into concrete, substantial shapes, crawling from the fire. Link saw a dog-like creature, perhaps a wolf or a coyote, pad from the flames, white eyes shining wildly, before disappearing in a plume of smoke. He saw a fish, larger than a grown man, wriggle its way through the room, bringing the sharp scent of freshwater streams with it. He saw a fawn, an elk, a massive owl made of light and darkness, the bushy smoke-tails of squirrels, he saw the slink of a fox and the rampage of a bear crashing through the fire before puffing into nothingness.

Talm fashioned apparition after apparition from the green smoke, eyes closed, body not her own. Soon after the parade of animals came shapes of a more humanoid nature, some tall and lean, some squat and round, with wide eyes and rotund, rocky backs—all were composed of the same ash, all had unsettling bright eyes, shining like beacons in the darkness.

The village resumed its chanting, but in place of a fervent, rhythmic incantation, a soft, almost sad hum rose from the crowd, calm and otherworldly. Link glanced over to Impa, picking out her deep voice, watching the minuscule vibrations of her throat as she joined the chorus. She stared ahead, almost as if in a trance, a look of resigned tranquility settling across her features. Link was not sure if Impa was still inside her own body, and almost reached out to grip her shoulder and ask if she was still around, when the procession stopped.

The last of the apparitions disappeared into smoke, the chanting ceased abruptly, and just as the familiar, human glint returned to Impa's eyes, the fire's dark glow abated, turning again to innocent, normal orange. The whole village released one collective sigh, and Talm fell forward to her knees, panting, covered in sweat. When she raised her head, Link could see she was herself again, exhausted perhaps, but smiling with the not-so-subdued triumph Talm exhibited whenever she did something noteworthy.

The fire returned to normal, Link's ears cleared themselves of the sound of chanting, and the strange, otherworldly smell dissipated. He suddenly found himself ridiculously hungry.

Talm pulled herself to her feet, wiping sweat off her forehead, and with it, the tiny, oily bead of blue paint. Shaking, she walked back to her place beside the elder and nearly collapsed onto her cushion, sighing deeply. Link could still spy some green smoke evaporate from her glossy, light brown skin.

"Excellent work, especially for one so young." The elder's voice was like an anchor dropping, keeping all who heard it firmly in the physical world. Link released a sigh when her raspy words echoed through the chamber, telling him that whatever had transpired, it was over now. "The spirits have accepted our thanks, and have given us leave to eat. You may begin."

Unlike the last gathering, the whole village dug in at once. Adults and children passed around plates of meat, of mushrooms and warm, dark breads, soups and preserves, and even some powdered sweet-cakes, no doubt of Irma's design. Someone had brought a massive ceramic jar of rice wine, and poured a generous portion into the clay cup of anyone who asked. Irma began to carve her boar, decorated with preserved fruits and spices. A plate of potatoes was passed around to Link's side of the fire, and Talm, preferring to catch her breath before eating, waved it on. She just leaned back on her pillow and shook slightly.

"I'm impressed, little sister," Impa said, leaning over to Talm. She snatched a steaming potato from the bowl and filled her own plate before passing it to Link. "You managed to summon up more than Sheim did last year."

"Yeah," Talm replied, still breathless. "Good thing he's gone to the Capital. If he saw me outdo him he'd kill me in my sleep."

"Not likely." Impa bit into her potato and accepted a swig of rice wine from the man with the jar.

Link took a portion of everything passed his way. After so many years of rotten leftovers, after some days wondering if he'd get to eat at all, he knew he had an obligation to gorge himself as much as he could. This might be the only opportunity he'd ever have, so he fully intended to eat himself into a stupor.

Impa, amused with Link's portions, decided to give him some advice. "If you ever find yourself too full to continue, call over Palo and he'll give you some firegrass to restore your appetite. It's the only way he manages to eat so much during the festival."

Talm laughed. "And he always regrets it the next day."

Link ate in silence for a little while. The elder went around the group, accepting offerings of food in exchange for blessings and good luck charms for use during the following year. She travelled through the village in a wide circle, gifting all sorts of trinkets to her denizens.

Link stared at the fire, at the shape of the elder making her rounds, bestowing benevolence on her subjects, laughing, talking animatedly with adults and children alike. He could not stop focusing on her shadow.

"Impa, what were those things that came from the fire?" he asked.

"Spirits," she answered simply, before taking another bite.

"Those are spirits? But they're so different than—" As usual, he found his throat constricted when he thought to speak of the wolf gods at the peak of Eldin.

Impa understood him. "There are many different spirits that live on this mountain, Link. This peak, and it's sister Death Mountain have plenty. Or… they used to. A long time ago, there were more spirits—much more than the ones we've seen just now. They were far more powerful, too. They would come at the festival and stay for a while, to wander and speak with us, to share jokes and stories. They used to be strong and healthy. Now…" she paused for a moment, chewing. "The spirits are as the souls of the dead—mere echoes of what they once were."

"Why?" Link asked.

"They have been worn down for a long time—ever since Ganond came to Hyrule. But recently… things have been worse. Ever since the Eldin War."

Link was about to ask her to expand on that topic, when suddenly the shadow of the elder fell across him, made tall and wide by her elaborate headdress. "Impa, it is inauspicious to speak of such things as war and genocide on a spiritual occasion."

Impa bowed her head. "Forgive me, elder Merel." Link bowed his too, just for good measure.

"It is all well, child," the old woman replied. She reached into her sleeve and pulled something out, gripping it in a gnarled fist. "These are for you."

She opened her hand and inside sat two small carvings of wood, each attached to a thin leather cord. One was round, the other triangular, and each sported mysterious runes Link could not interpret.

"This one is for you," the elder said, presenting the circular piece to Impa. "It will give you hope when hope fails you. And this," she turned to Link, "is for you. It will supply you with courage." Link took the small trinket from her and looked it over. Closer inspection did not clear up any confusion—it was still uninterpretable. "I have this vague feeling you might need it," she said before chuckling quietly and turning back to the warmth of the fire.

Link stared at the triangular wooden thing for a few moments before tucking it into his breast pocket and resuming his meal. In a few minutes, and after more than one cup of rice wine, he forgot all about war, all about spirits, and all about the trinket. He shortly found himself preoccupied when Talm stood up, reinvigorated by her dinner, and insisted they all start a dance.


	20. Springtime

"Why, in the worst of times, do we never fail to fall back on ritual for comfort? It is because ritual allows us to rely on the expected in a world filled with too many unpleasant surprises."

Arigor, Priest of Hylia

* * *

The coldest and longest nights of the Eldin winter came and went, watching Link through the colored glass of Irma's windows, or through the cracks in the walls of the elder's library. When the darkness crept onto the village and hovered over it for more than half a day, when sword practice, hunting, and henhouse care had to be done within the short confines of sunlight, Link preoccupied himself in the nights with more scholarly pursuits. This was only partially by his own free will, since Impa often stood behind him like a watchful guard, pointing out his mistakes and guiding the narrative of the nation of Hyrule forward.

Spurred on by Link's curiosity regarding the spiritual wane of Mount Eldin, Impa led him through the relevant scrolls and tomes. Eldin's decline began, for the most part, with the ascent of Garona's daughter Elgra. The stories and manuscripts depicted her as a woman with her mother's beauty but her grandfather's ruthlessness. Nearly half a century after Eldin and Ordona had secured their own sovereignty, she defied the ministers and lawmakers of her late mother's reign, and rode to the east with the intention of reclaiming the land lost from Hyrule.

With the armies of both Faron and Lanayru province behind her, she tore through Eldin in the manner of her grandfather, destroying its strongholds, burning its forests and pillaging its mines (Impa tried to explain to Link possible economic motivations and the logistics of the excavation of coal and precious metals, but after his eyes drooped and he fell asleep on his own crossed arms, she skipped to the battles). The Queen and her army, her only son among her generals, marched along the Deadwood River, through the towns of Eldoran and Leda with uninterrupted success.

But when she arrived at the gates to the great city inside Death Mountain, she was met with unparalleled resistance. The siege that followed lasted for nearly a year, from the late springtime to midwinter, before the cold and snows finally drove Elgra back to Lanayru in defeat.

The victory for Eldin did not come without a price. Death Mountain had earned its monicker that winter; the town of Leda still lay in empty ruin at the base of the slopes, and the city within the mountain, once warmed by godly fire and the movements of magma, now lay cold and dark.

Link sorted through pages illustrating the city that once stood within the throat of the peak, filled with strange, rock-like creatures, with black eyes and wide faces. Impa told him that they were called Gorons, and that none had survived the Battle of Eldin. But the fight they had put up inspired thousands of songs and tales, and at the time, proved a rallying point for the decimated armies of Eldin to regroup at Old Riko and drive out Mandrag Elgra for good.

Though the province eventually recovered, the spirits did not. The extensive tracts of land Elgra burnt regrew into young forests, but the small gods and natural entities that had once lived in abundance among them never returned. It had been a long decline for Eldin; the steady disappearance of spirits from Hyrule proper, and the shrinking native Sheikah and Goron populations were running their slow course, but the Eldin War sealed the fates of both peoples and their accompanying spirits.

In the course of less than twenty years, Sheikah ritual nearly died out with the near-extermination of its people—the old language was a privilege retained for elders and the surviving spirits, more and more members chose to assimilate themselves into the neighboring Hylian culture, towns and villages and shrines lay crumbled and abandoned. But where the Sheikah had at least an echo of their once-great culture in the form of one heartily surviving village, the Gorons had no such remnant. As far as anyone knew, there were no survivors.

"Did you ever get to meet a Goron?" Link asked Impa.

"Apparently, once, when I was a baby. That was right before the war ended. Of course, I don't remember it." She closed the book in front of him, lowering her eyes. "That should be enough for now. You've been absorbing all of this like a sponge for the past few weeks. I can't imagine how overwhelming it must be to finally learn all this."

Link shrugged. He had no idea about the history of his own land, his King's family, the golden power that lay sleeping in his massive palace, the bloodline of the yellow-haired girl. It hadn't been pertinent to him, to say the least—he needed only to know when to bring the chickens in for winter, how to groom a horse, how to train a hound; there was no room in his head for abstractions of the past.

But now, with Talon and his animals on the other side of the mountain range, halfway across the fractured country, he could learn. He tried to retain as much of the narrative as possible, but what interested him most was not the dates, the names of wars, the tactics and banners used in each one, but the young prince who had marched into Eldin alongside his mother, lauded as a hero despite her defeat. In the deep snows of the late year, he had vanquished the great Durmia, patriarch of the Goron clan, in single combat. It had marked the beginning of the end for the Goron people, but the beginning of the rise of the young prince.

Poets and historians used the same words to describe him as they used for his great-grandfather, the indomitable Conqueror King—hair like fire, skin shining like green obsidian, taller and broader than any man in the land, cloaked in finery and wielding an unstoppable broadsword. Link thought of the King at the winter festival (a celebration he learned coincided with Elgra's death and her son's subsequent coronation), arms spread, white smile wide, glowing with magic and resplendent in his power. A small, ignorant deaf boy had fallen in love with him then, with the very idea of him, but had never known his history, never known anything about him.

"What was the prince's name?" Link asked.

"Elgra's son?" Impa pulled Link from the pile of scrolls and books, brushing the dust off his shoulders and affectionately straightening his hat. "He's no prince anymore. He was coronated during the winter festival thirteen years ago. He's Mandrag now."

"But what was his name?"

"Ganondorf."

Link repeated the name for himself. It sounded mighty, of course, perhaps even brutal, but also dignified in its own way. It sounded strange to him—although, until very recently, all things did: names, places, words, music, breathing. But he could not help but think such a name suited the King; it was as wide as his shoulders, and as grand as his stature.

As Impa led him out of the room stacked high with books, he thought about the King's generosity, his mercy. Perhaps, when they met again, Link would see his face and be sure that the cruelty that stained his family line had not stained him—or he had at least overcome it. Perhaps it was true that he fought under his mother's command in the pitiless siege of Death Mountain, but if Link had a mother, he was sure he'd do the same for her. He imagined Irma descending the slopes of Eldin to retake her hometown, wherever that was, and knew that both her daughters—and Link himself—would be at her side. He tried to picture the woman decked out in royal black armor, red cape flying from her back, riding a massive warhorse like the Conqueror King himself, and couldn't help but grin.

"What are you smiling at?" Impa asked him, and he shook his head. He just latched onto her arm as she led him back out into the snowy village, the smell of her mother's cooking permeating the chilly air.

* * *

As expected, and predicted in Talporom's letter, the King marched out of the Capital shortly after the conclusion of the winter festivities. With the limitations of the old year behind him, the monarch gathered his forces and marched through the brown fields of Lanayru as soon as the snows showed signs of melting. By the time he got south to Faron and set up camp where the forests thinned into the dry grasslands of the near-desert, spring had established itself in full force.

It came rolling over the hills from the east, like a verdant, protracted sunrise, and with it came restlessness. Impa and Palo nearly begged the elder to send them away from the village on some sort of mission, perhaps to redeem themselves regarding their last failure, but she insisted that it was better to wait, that the time for action would come soon enough.

Talm took her mother down to Old Riko to attend the theater several times, returning occasionally with a few silks and hats of the latest fashion—clothes that Irma would rarely wear, for fear of damaging them in the routine of village life. Link stayed behind, tending to Irma's notoriously slow-witted chickens and indignant goat when he was not exchanging blows with Impa or reading under her careful, stringent watch.

Talm, who had learned quite a bit as a girl from Impa, warned Link that she was an incorrigible disciplinarian, and the worst schoolmistress a boy could have (Link had to ask what a schoolmistress was, then had to spend an hour absorbing the idea of a schoolhouse—"You mean… children in Old Riko don't _work_?"). Impa lived up to her reputation, smacking Link with a stick when his fighting posture slumped, boxing his ears when he fell asleep at his books, and occasionally knocking him off his chair for misspelling something during Irma's calligraphy lessons.

With each passing week she grew more restless, and consequently less tolerant of his mistakes. Talm and Palo tried to pacify her, but sometimes when she was in an especially destructive mood, she would disappear to the edge of the village and terrible, otherworldly sounds would emanate from her harp; tree branches would fly, birds would scatter from their nests, and occasionally, night would arrive several hours early.

"She's hibernating, and she wants to wake up," Talm said one day, after one of these episodes. Link had no idea what she was talking about.

"Then let's help her," Palo had answered. Link followed them as they trotted through new, green grass to where Impa stood with her harp, frowning. A few wildflower buds sat at her feet, waiting for the bloom, moving slightly in the warm wind. When she heard the three of them behind her, creeping like mischievous children, she turned and strummed a harsh note, forcing them to cover their ears.

"Devils below, Impa," Palo said. "You don't have to scare us like that."

She smiled a little, tugging the weird, old lyre closer to her shoulder. "What do you want?"

Talm grabbed Impa's arm. "Come on, we're going to the river. It's time for spring to really begin."

Link was unaware of this ritual. He'd never been to the river when it hadn't been frozen over and covered in snow. He followed his companions for a few miles through the thawed and greening forest, to the warming banks of the bright river, greenish blue and flowing with foam.

He looked at the lazy water, then back at Talm, who was already half-naked, ripping off her cloth tunic and leather leggings. Even after all these months of living among people who bathed communally in the hot springs, he still could not help averting his eyes when Talm's clothes fell off her. He figured he was just unused to it—ever since he could remember, he'd washed himself with the same water he sprayed over the animals, designating them his only bathing partners.

"Get undressed," she told him. He looked around, confused, and saw both Impa and Palo stripping to their smallclothes. He stumbled forward, wrestling off his tunic, tripping over the grey, round rocks on the river's edge. He didn't have the heart to tell them he didn't know how to swim.

Talm jumped in, screaming wildly, followed by her sister, who let out a yell that could petrify an army. Palo endured the plunge with his usual satisfied silence. Link kicked off his boots and stumbled into the shallow bank before crying out and scrambling away, hugging his arms and retreating to shore.

"Come on!" Talm nearly screamed at him. "It'll wake you up."

He just shook his head.

"It's just glacial runoff," Palo shivered. He smiled widely, teeth chattering. Impa burst from the absurdly blue water and waded up to him, reaching out to him. The smile on her face told him her mood had improved drastically, so he couldn't stop himself from reaching back. She gripped his hands in her own and started to pull him, gently, toward the water. He gulped and let her lead him to the riverbank, hissing as the water licked at his ankles.

Impa fed him encouraging words as she led him up to his knees. His toes had gone numb and his hair stood on end, but he followed her.

Palo smiled, neck-deep in the blue river. "The worst part is when it hits your nuts," he said. "Then it gets better."

Link could not say he disbelieved Palo, but when the water sloshed over his hips and sent shivers through his every limb, he couldn't help but swear. Everything seemed to shrink, painfully, and the unbelievable cold spread to the still-dry parts of him, forcing his hair on end.

"That's the spirit!" Palo called, laughing.

When he was shoulder-deep in the water, current tugging at his legs and arms, he latched onto Impa, thinking that if his feet should leave the bottom, she might as well know. "I can't swim," he told her.

" _What_?" Her eyes widened, and she nearly let go out of shock. His heart rushed to his throat as her grip loosened, and he gasped a little, kicking silt from the bottom of the river and falling forward. Water swallowed him, freezing pain rushing through his face, his ears, the back of his head, and for a moment he was quite sure he'd been swept away, never to reemerge from the icy water. But Impa's arms wrapped quickly around him, and she tugged him out of the river with a glacial spray and a desperate grunt.

"Dammit, Link!" she growled, pushing him back toward the shore. He coughed up the icy water, holding his stomach as he collapsed onto the rocky bank, half laughing, half gasping. Impa stood over him, dripping wet, shaking her head. Palo pulled himself up beside her, lips blue, and smiled.

"Some guts you got," he said. Talm followed them all out of the water to watch Link sputter on the stones. He pulled himself from the rocks, shivering, and asked them to teach him.

It was a slow, freezing process, but when he was floating by himself, water caressing his sides, he forgot about the cold for a fleeting, wonderful moment. Later, when the river proved too icy to continue the lesson, he lay on the shore, shivering between Talm and Impa, letting the sun slowly dry him.

Palo plucked a weed from the riverbank and started chewing on its end, staring up at the clouds. "Just like when we were kids, huh?" he said quietly.

"That's the point of the spring dip," Talm answered, yawning. "It's the same every year."

"We're just lucky we always end up here together in spring," Impa said. "Merel never seems to send us out on tasks until everything blooms."

"Maybe she knows we all have to bathe in the river at least once before we go our separate ways for the year," Talm suggested.

Impa sat up, reaching over for her lyre, laying it on her lap and plucking a few notes. "Look at what I've been working on," she said, almost proudly. The harp glowed a dull blue, sending its tune to the water, forcing a few bubbles of foam to rise to the top. They floated along the surface for a couple seconds before popping and disappearing into the air.

"Wow," Talm laughed derisively. "That's some powerful magic."

Impa narrowed her eyes and pulled her hand along the strings, a harsh, bright sound rushing through the air, nearly knocking Talm back into the brush. A burst of foamy water flew from the river, glinting in the light. It fell over all of them with a freezing splash, Talm throwing up her hands and screaming profanities, Link instinctively ducking behind Impa as the water descended.

"Great," Talm growled, twisting her long hair in her hands and wringing it out. "Now we're going to have to sit here while we get dry _again_."

"I don't mind," Palo said. He had taken the watery assault silently, unmoving. He still lay on his back, soaked weed dangling from his mouth.

Link reclined between his friends and ignored the wet shivers that ran through him. He didn't really mind, either.

* * *

When they got back from the river, fully dressed and warmed by the afternoon sun, an unfamiliar man strode through the village, dressed in plates of leather, black cloak dragging on the ground behind him. He slipped like a shadow under the blooming cherry trees, turning his head when they approached.

Palo called out to the man, and he dropped his hood to reveal a scarred, tired face. The red tattoos about his eyes wrinkled in worry. "Impa, Talm," he said, unsmiling. "You might want to be there when I report to the elder."

"What's wrong?" Talm asked, but Impa shushed her.

"We'll come with you," she said. She looked over her shoulder at Link and Palo. "I'll meet you back at my mother's house."

Link nodded. He did not like the worry in her eyes, the way her mouth curled down at the corners. As she and her sister followed the messenger up the slope toward the elder's ornate cavern, he turned to Palo. The man's eyes traced the steps of the two sisters, before he lowered his head and made his way to the smoky abode of the welcoming Irma.

She took their coats, bidding them sit by the fire, until Palo interrupted her well-intentioned pleasantries. "Irma, a report came back from the camps at Silk. Talm and Impa are with the elder. I'm sure whatever they're hearing, you'd like to hear."

Irma's face paled, her smile faded. She nodded wordlessly before trotting through the front door. She didn't bother closing it behind her before she rushed up the hill toward the elder's cave. Palo grabbed its handle and creaked it shut before seating himself beside Link in front of the fire.

He stared into the flames, sighing slowly. Link did not ask—he merely reached out and touched Palo's shoulder, prodding him for answers.

Palo shook his head. "Don't ask me what's going on. We should wait for those three to get back and tell us themselves."

Link crossed his arms over his knees and lay his head against them. He could tell by the messenger's posture, his fallen face, his peculiar air of hopelessness, that something was amiss. Ever since Eldin had granted him his hearing, he had sacrificed some sensitivity of smell and the other senses, but it did not take much keenness to gather the man's message contained some bad news about Talporom.

He gripped his elbows, hoping Impa's father wasn't dead. He hadn't even met him yet—it would be a spectacular failure on the part of fate to kill him before they spoke to one another. After all, Link had heard so much about him—his unconventional marriage, his exploits, his unsurpassed skill in healing, his kindness—goddesses above, Link had worn his old hat for months. That must constitute some sort of bond, since after all, it was the first piece of clothing he'd received outside the soiled garments of a stableboy.

Link did not know how long he and Palo waited in Irma's house, dusty light pouring in through the window. The two remained wordless, Palo closing his eyes and breathing deeply, Link fidgeting with his green hat, marveling at exactly how loud silence could be.

He watched the beam of sunlight filtered through the window crawl its way from the fireplace to the table before Talm burst through the door in a rush of fury.

"We have to go see for ourselves," she said, stomping across the wooden floor.

"No, you don't," Irma replied, desperate, disheveled.

"Mother, we've been stuck in the village for months," Impa said, gripping Irma's shoulder tightly. "We get word of _this_ and you expect us to linger here?"

"But Merel said—"

"Elder Merel said to do what we must. You know what that means as well as any of us."

Palo stood, crossing his arms and clearing his throat. "Care to tell me what happened?"

Talm's eyes flashed at him, watery, narrowed. "The King's forces raided father's camp."

Link's stomach dropped. He knew he should've expected an event like this to arise, especially since Talporom and his family seemed keen on the King, keen on spying on him, keen on his family history and those of his enemies. Link drew in a sharp breath, and after only a second of thought, gave up on trying to sort through his alliances to a man he'd met once, and a man he hadn't met at all. He looked up at Palo, noting the determined frown appearing on his brown lips, and turned back to the sisters.

Talm practically ran to the far wall and started removing weaponry and coats from their stands and hangers. Impa walked close behind, calm but wearing that indefatigable face of the warrior. She pulled out the very bag they had taken to the peak of Eldin, and started to stuff in clothes, dried foods, tools. Irma watched, brow furrowed, hands wringing.

"Should I ready my things?" Palo asked, folding his hands behind his head.

Impa paused, lifting her gaze to the two of them. "If you wish."

"I do. If Talporom's in trouble, it would be downright evil of me to ignore it."

"I'll come too," Link put in. The desperation in his own voice caught even him off guard.

"No," Impa barked. "You stay here. You're not fully trained—you'll be nothing more than a liability."

Link deflated, her words forcing the air out of him like a swift blow. He looked at Irma, whose blue eyes met his, wet and widened with disquiet. She shook her head and clutched one hand to her chest. "Yes… you stay here, Link. Keep me company while my girls are away." She spoke hoarsely, with a faraway intonation, almost as if she were not wholly in her own body.

Link's breath came shallow and pained as he watched the sisters pack up. Talm stuffed food, extra clothes and other necessities into the bag, while Impa lay her lyre between two strips of leather and slung it over her back. Palo had retreated into the warm afternoon air, padding softly along the dirt to his own house. Link just stood against the wall, next to Irma, at a loss, as Impa walked to a particularly large and intimidating sword against the wall. It sat in its scabbard among so many other tools like it, and Link had never quite taken the time to notice its size or elegant, slightly curved shape.

"You're taking Bloodletter?" Irma almost whispered.

"Of course." Impa lifted the weapon from the wall and drew it partway out of its scabbard, checking the broad blade. She sheathed it again and turned to her sister. "Are you ready, Talm?"

"As I'll ever be." The young woman slipped twin short swords into curved scabbards across her waist. She pulled a small strip of silk from the folds of her clothing and shook back her hair, gathering it at the top of her head and securing it tightly.

Irma stood in silence while her daughters swept on their hooded cloaks and headed for the door. Her hand reached Link's, and she squeezed it with cold, thin fingers. He watched her eyebrows draw together and wrinkle slightly, and he gave her a reassuring squeeze back. If this was what Impa wished—if this was where he was needed, he would stay here with Irma until they returned.

The sisters opened the front door, fully armed and hasty, only to find a small, round silhouette blocking their way. The figure itself did not come up to Impa's shoulders, but the shadow it cast was long and dark and commanding. The sisters stepped aside, halting their furious scurrying, and made way for the elder as she walked calmly into their house.

"Children," she said. "You are in such a rush to leave, you have forgotten something." Merel pointed a gnarled finger at Link. The sisters glanced over their shoulders at him, and he couldn't help but shrink a little under their fierce red gazes.

"Elder Merel, he's not co—"

"He is wasted if he is left here," Merel said. "And if there is one principal sin in this world, it is needless waste." Impa stepped back, grimacing, but did not argue. She turned to Link and motioned for him to get dressed. With a skip of his heart, he slipped his hand out of Irma's. He wondered if she knew how desperately she grabbed at him after he took his fingers from hers—or if she was even aware of doing so. Her eyes stayed put on her daughters.

"Fetch your hunting bow, and that sword from the wall," Impa told him. Link followed her pointing finger and picked out a nondescript sword, slid deep into a brown leather scabbard. It was a little heavier than the practice blades he used, but well within the limits of his strength. The pommel boasted a dull pinkish stone, and the cross-guard, while plain, curved elegantly. At its middle, the rain guard took the form of the eye of truth, wrought from blue and red metal.

He swung the weapon over his back, retrieved his crude hunting bow from the far hall, hastily threw together a pack of necessities, and pulled his own cloak around him (of course, it wasn't _his_ ; everything he wore or used belonged either to Talporom in a far-gone age or Palo in a near-gone one).

"Are you prepared?" Impa asked him.

He nodded. He couldn't think of anything else he needed—at least, that he'd find in Irma's living room. When Palo's shadow appeared in the doorway, the sisters receded into the golden light of the afternoon. Link made to follow them out, but a hand gripped his wrist and tugged him back.

Irma pulled him close to her, laying a hand on either cheek before planting a kiss on his forehead. "Pass that on to my girls," she said quietly. "They're always in such a hurry to leave."

Link nodded, reddening, and dashed out the door after them.


	21. The Rolling Hills of the Old Country

"A home is not where a journey begins, by any means; a home is where it ends."

Obaru of the Haunted Waste

* * *

"This is not going to be a pleasant trip," Impa told Link as they hurried down the mountain. He didn't have the breath to waste on a reply. He only found himself panting and tripping, holding the straps of his small pack as if he could manage his wildly shifting balance with them. He slid down the wet gullies of mountain streams, jumped roots and gnarled stumps, barely holding himself steady as he tried to keep up with his companions.

The Sheikah did not so much run as tumble down the mountain in a controlled, directed fall. They eased over the slopes, ducking between trees and hurdling boulders like fish through water. Even Impa, with that monster of a sword slung across her back, sprinted effortlessly down the spring-wetted gullies and bloom-speckled glens. Link panted and puffed, and as the sun set and darkness overtook the mountain, the descent only became more difficult. But his companions' pace barely slowed, and he clumsily ran after them, trying his best to remember Impa's teachings about light-footedness, speed, and never wasting momentum. He concentrated on these lessons as he ran after his companions, burrowing so deep in his own mind he almost overtook them when they suddenly halted in a clearing.

Link skidded to a stop in the darkness, suddenly noticing the warmth and thickness of the air. It appeared they had nearly descended the mountain, and by the stars' positions in the sky, had done so in a matter of hours. Since he had only experienced the climb up blind and deaf and half-conscious, he could not fathom if it was reasonable or not for them to have descended in that time. He just looked behind him, at the green forests, at the distant, brown and grey peaks jutting like wolf's teeth toward the sky.

"We need horses," Talm said as she slowed. They all caught their breath a moment (to Link's infinite relief), before setting off again toward the town of Old Riko, at a reasonable trot rather than a sprint.

"That we do. Fast ones," Palo replied. "But we're as close to broke as we can get, and it's getting late. I suspect we won't have much luck convincing Temon to lend us a few."

"We'll have to try," Impa said. "If we can't secure them from him, we'll go some other place."

Link followed in silence, too winded to even speak. He followed his companions closely, sticking to the long shadows they cast.

It was nearly midnight when they reached Old Riko. Despite the lateness of the day, tall lamps lit the red brick streets, and townsfolk went here and there in their evening wear, much like they had in the Capital. Ladies wrapped their stoles about them in the cool night, laughing with friends, heels clicking on the bricks. Link stopped to listen to their speech, to the swish of their dresses and the sound of their shoes—it was the first time he could actually hear the noises of a town. The music and laughter emanating from the street's many pubs, the distant but gargantuan creak of the windmill, the shouts of fights and even the clang of kitchen utensils beating violently against pots and pans—Link had never heard such cacophony. The village of Kakariko seemed quiet in comparison, even with its wild animals and creaking trees making such a ruckus at night.

So preoccupied with the sounds of the town, Link almost lost his companions, and his purpose, in the din. He had to scan the street and pick out the messy, almost-white hair of Palo above the groups of laughing theatergoers, of drunk companions stumbling across the street. He gathered his wits about him and made off after them, catching up just as they arrived at the stable of the man to whom Impa had returned the little mule so many months before.

"Temon," Impa called, and the old man crept from the shadows behind his barn, wide scowl on his face.

"What do you want?" he mumbled.

"We need your fastest horses."

"At this hour? Girl, it's past sundown, where do you have to go riding all of a sudden?"

"It's Talporom. He's in trouble; we're being sent to aid him."

"Talporom? All right, then. I'll need payment up front. Gold, too. None of that old rupee garbage, as usual."

"Well, we—"

"I didn't know you had an aunt," Palo said, suddenly. The others turned to him wordlessly. He stood with his eyes shut, tattoos scanning the yard. Looks of relative uncertainty crossed the sisters' faces, but they remained silent, instead preferring to let Palo sustain the conversation.

Temon crossed his arms. "I don't."

"Not anymore, you don't. She's dead. Long dead. And…" The muscles around Palo's eyes flexed a little, warping his tattoos in such a way to make it look like they were squinting. "Quite fat, and filthy rich."

The old man shook his head. "So what."

"So… she's whispering to me a thing or two about where she hid her fortune. Well… technically I suppose it is yours now."

Temon nearly laughed. "Nice try, deadseer. Like I'm going to fall for that."

"Your loss. I'll just dig that treasure up myself and go buy some horses with that." Palo feigned leaving.

"Wait." Temon's voice was low, resigned. The man shook his head, brow furrowed, and Link could almost see his eyes roll under his closed lids. "Hell. I owe your father a favor anyway. Take 'em. You can pay when you get back."

When the man had given them each a mount, saddled and ready, Palo leaned down to Temon and said, apparently in gratitude: "For your generosity: walk twelve paces north of the oak tree behind your barn. Thirty-three paces east from there, you'll come across two tall stones. Between them is buried a title deed for your aunt's land and twelve thousand rupees. She wants you to have them."

As they rode away, Link looked behind him to see Temon's face pale and his eyes widen.

* * *

"That was pathetic, Palo," Impa said, when they had left Old Riko (and possibly Eldin proper—Link wasn't sure). Sometime before dawn, they decided it might be a good time for a short rest, and dismounted, letting the horses graze on the thin grass of the new spring. "It wasn't bad enough that your trick didn't work, so you had to lie to the man?"

"How am I supposed to guess there's _not_ treasure there?" Palo said, kneeling on the small stones next to the road and digging for his flint. "Seems to me like a good enough place to bury some."

Talm shook her head, smiling. "I wonder if Temon'll actually look for it."

"Doesn't matter. At the end of this campaign I'll get me some gold coins and bury them myself. Drop them down his well or something." Palo leaned back and smiled when he had a small but healthy fire going.

"Or," Impa said curtly, crossing her arms. "You could just pay him back when we return with my father, no trickery needed."

"Where's the fun in that?" Palo asked.

Link sat down next to him on the gravel, crossing his legs and warming his hands by the small fire. Palo pulled some jerky from his pack and handed it over.

"You're not as much of a burden as I would've thought," he said. The small admission made Link smile. "A little slow on the run, but your horsemanship is top-notch."

"Does that surprise you?" Impa asked, seating herself opposite them. "He was a stablehand in the royal palace. He trained the King's own horse." Link glanced up at her. He did not recall telling her that particular detail. She shrugged. "I watched you for a while."

Link frowned and returned his attention to his jerky.

"So, we taking the usual route then?" Talm asked, stretching.

"The usual route?" Link inquired.

"We're riding east until we reach Hylia's shores, then we can go north to Riverton," Impa answered. "From there it's straight through the wide plains until Gerudo Valley." Her words passed half-understood through his mind. In the hours he spent in Kakariko's library, she had shown him a map of the country—several, in fact—but he had not committed them closely enough to memory to know the exact locations of landmarks. He had the general grasp of the Conqueror King's route from the desert to Castletown, but the small details of his lesser victories had slipped Link's mind.

"We won't have much time to waste on rest," Impa said. "If we want to get to our father before… well, perhaps it is best to leave the possibilities unexplored." She hung her head and pursed her lips. "I'll keep watch while you rest, provided you let me sleep a full night when we get to Riverton. I'll wake you all up well before midmorning."

"Deal," Palo said. He lay down on the stones, not bothering to unpack his bedroll, and put his hands behind his head, breathing deeply. Link pulled out his things, folded Talporom's hat beneath his head and rested on its wooly surface. He watched the tired horses blink slowly, black eyes shining wearily in the firelight. It did relieve him to have the familiar scents of horses around him; Kakariko had no such mounts since none of them could make the climb up the hillside. It felt right, having them near again, and now he could even hear their hooves against the ground, their contented snorts, the flick of their tails as they whipped flies from their flanks.

He had barely closed his eyes when Impa shook him awake. Her hand gently grasped his shoulder and she drew him out of deep senselessness. He tried to wave her away, but she persisted, and he sat up in the morning light, barely conscious. Somehow, he managed wolf down breakfast, climb up on his horse and follow the others along the road, all in a mindless state of half-sleep.

Despite the horses' hooves beating furious and quick on the dirt road, the scenery around them changed slowly. The sweeps of evergreen Eldine forests thinned, making way for patches of deciduous trees, buds of pink and yellow trembling at their branch ends. When the afternoon came around and warmed the roads, even those trees had diminished in number, leaving only the swaying green grass, almost fluid in the wind.

Old stone fences and creaking wooden enclosures lined the empty road, a few cows and horses grazing contentedly at the margins. They lifted their heavy heads and regarded the small, frantic parade of horses with dull black eyes before unhurriedly lowering their mouths again to the thin, early grass around the fenceposts. A few shepherds took their eyes from their flocks to watch the group ride past, leaning on their walking sticks and shaking their heads at the feverish pace of the travelers.

It seemed the flow of time slowed in the fields of Lanayru. The farmers, field hands, their animals and crops appeared to have a perfect grasp on the absoluteness of time—they did not know haste. As Link rode past, sharing in the exhaustion that covered his horse's flanks with sweat and slowed her gallop, he wished he could slip off her back and join the timelessness of those fields. He had not noticed this enchanting facet of his surroundings the first time he'd wandered through the province; at the time he'd been confined to the back of a wagon, concerned with only his own safety and mourning the fate of the yellow-haired girl. But now that he had a full view of the fields, and all his faculties with which to appreciate them, he wished for nothing more than to veer from the road into a patch of verdant crops and bury himself in their budding leaves.

He kept onward through the afternoon. Having skipped the midday meal, his stomach growled piteously inside him, and he reached into his breast pocket for a few crumbs or a half-smashed biscuit Irma had a habit of leaving for him when he wasn't looking. Instead he found the small charm the elder had given him—he gripped it tightly, keeping it safe in his palm while the horse lurched and swayed. He slipped it back in his pocket, disappointed that he had not discovered something slightly more edible, but reminded himself that despite his fears, despite his desire to retreat into the tall grass of Lanayru and sleep, he had the well-wishes of the villagers he'd left behind.

It was the elder's desire that he should aid Impa in her attempt to rescue her father. He could not disappoint her—couldn't disappoint Talm, or Palo, or Irma, or, worst of all, Impa herself. He would ride with them, fight with them, until they had Talporom back.

 _But what of the King?_ The voice slinked out of the recesses of his mind like a guilty snake, grasping and deflating his courage. He did not know what he would do if he encountered the two at odds. Should Talporom be found under the executioner's axe, Link would no doubt interfere, but he would rather solve this dispute between the King and the Sheikah some other way.

 _I can speak now. I may not be eloquent, as Palo says, but I can speak. I can stand between them and speak reason to both._

Link lowered his head against the breeze, heart filling up with this new idea. He committed to it, etching it into the back of his mind. If engendering peace between them was even remotely possible, he had an obligation to at least try.

With his newfound goal, he spurred his horse onward, ignoring the enticing stillness of the fields around him, stopping only when the grass suddenly shone on the horizon brighter than the sky.

"What is that?" Link asked, squinting against the blinding, golden grass.

"It's Lake Hylia," Impa answered, eyeing him over his shoulder.

He had never seen a body of water larger than the small lake cradled between the hills of Old Riko. This massive thing, lit gold with the late-setting sun, stretched farther than he could see. A few spits of land jutted from the water, forming rocky, grassy islands, and he thought he spied something of a cloud, white and triangular, sailing along the water's surface.

"You think that's big, you should see the ocean," Talm said.

" _You've_ never seen the ocean," Impa informed her.

"Just trying to give him some perspective." The young woman shrugged and nudged her horse onward. Link took a few more moments to stare at the wide, sun-glinting water, its rocky shores, the flocks of white birds gliding far above its surface, before trotting after Talm.

"What's the ocean?" he asked.

* * *

Riverton's gates were tall, wide, and heavily guarded. Massive posts composed of blueish marble boasted black bars dull and soft in the evening light. The two guards who stood at its side halted them and questioned them for a little while before allowing them through. As the last grey light of evening disappeared behind them, the gates creaked shut, and the guards wished them a healthy stay, apologizing for the interrogation.

"In these trying times, it is best to keep cautious," he said, nodding at them from beneath his blue-silver helmet. Impa thanked him, sliding off her black mare into the city proper, leading her companions down the street.

The city smelled of grass and fresh water. There was little of the overwhelming smoke-scent of Old Riko, even less of the pollution of the Capital. The air was fresh and wet, the people lively. They gathered under the intricate lamps of the main boulevards, laughing and talking. A few sat outside well-lit pubs and bakeries, sharing wine from silver goblets and snacking on intricately-arranged but bewilderingly bare plates. A pair of spotted dogs followed a woman in a black silk dress across the street, flanking her like loyal guards. Each sported a jeweled collar, outshone only by the one the woman wore high on her white throat.

Link never felt dirtier, walking with his dust-caked boots and exhausted horse through the decorated, music-lined streets of Riverton. He noticed some eyes narrowing at his presence, some townspeople scurrying out of the way of his stampede of dust and sweat and horse-scent. He suddenly found himself longing for nothing more than a good soak in the hot springs of Eldin, if not only so he could avoid the condescending stares of the wealthy citizens of the city.

The long notes of some sort of instrument glided through the air, and Link turned to see a man on the street corner, dressed in a blue waistcoat and white shoes, playing an instrument he had seen many times at the pub in the Capital, but never heard.

Link halted his horse with a hand to its cheek, and stopped to listen, to watch the man draw the long bow across the strings, fingers wiggling at the end of the instrument's black neck. Something of a high, weeping noise came from the strings, louder than Link would've thought possible from such a small instrument. A few passers-by dropped some silver coins at the musician's feet.

Beyond the sound of that eerie instrument, Link's keen ears could make out the trickle of something like a river. Realizing he'd lingered too long, he trotted after the others, keeping an eye out for the source of that watery sound. When they rounded a corner into a large, blue-tiled square, he found it.

At the center of the plaza, massive and round, decked with white marble and adorned with intricate statues, a fountain spouted water into the night air. It was much larger than the fountain at the end of the boulevard in the Capital, and infinitely more ornate. Lights lit the water from below, coloring the streams a supernatural silver. Statues of fish, men and women, and what appeared to be a cross between the two adorned its middle, figures bending to pour lovely streams of water from jugs, hauling nets of stone fish from the glowing water. One marble woman stood taller than the rest, boasting large eyes and a fin-tailed head, letting the water fall from her outstretched hands, dripping across the long fins fanning from her delicate elbows.

Link trotted to Impa, nearly dragging his horse behind him. The townsfolk backed away from him, no doubt repulsed by the filthy state of both him and his animal, and he had no trouble falling into stride beside her. "Why are those people half fish?" he asked, nodding to the figures overlooking the clear, brightly lit water.

"That was built to commemorate an economic alliance between the people of Lanayru and the Zoras. Riverton's at the delta that feeds into Lake Hylia. It used to be that this was the stopping point for any trade up the River Hylia to the Capital; the riverboats would take all sorts of products up to the city."

Link looked around him, at the too-human crowd, light-skinned and decidedly finless. A couple sat at the fountain's edge, lost in a passionate kiss, and an old man, scowl on his face, watched them intently. None of them sported any signs of aquatic features. "Where are all the Zoras, then?" he asked.

"Nobody knows," Impa answered, turning away from the fountain and the main square. She led him down a small street, toward the city walls. "They left Lanayru two decades ago and haven't been seen since."

"Why?"

Impa lowered her voice, glancing about her. "After the extermination of the Gorons, they feared Elgra's campaigns were… racially motivated. One day they were here, the next, gone. No one knows where they fled."

Link glanced behind him to get another look at the fountain, but too many twists and turns of the road came between him and the main square. He sighed and lowered his head.

"But you can't go around expressing regret about the loss," Impa told him. "Lanayru is the King's heartland. Here, unlike Kakariko, you have to watch what you say." Link nodded. Everyone knew he was not a particularly avid talker—he was at little risk of landing them in trouble.

When they turned another corner and arrived at a small but well-lit inn, Talm and Palo took their horses to the dilapidated stables next to the stone building. Impa, bright-eyed beneath her black hood, led Link through the blue stained glass door into a bright, torchlit mess hall. The benches were stone, and long vines of domestic plants crawled along the shelves and ceiling. Small blue and white tiles lined the walls, forming a simple but elegant mosaic portraying a fisherman floating above a body of bright water, a few Zoras swimming below him. One of them was at the surface, handing the man on the boat a fish.

The establishment was crowded and noisy, but Impa sidled up to an empty stool at the shining bar and asked for a meal and drinks. When money was exchanged and the barkeep turned to fix them whatever she had ordered, Impa leaned back in her stool.

"Here is a part of your training that you can't properly learn in Kakariko," she said quietly. "Now that your ears work, I think it's about time you started practicing your eavesdropping." She glanced at him under her hood. "Don't grimace like that; it's conspicuous. Just close your eyes—you can use them later, after you've heard what you can. Lean back and relax your arms, and imagine the words coming at you. You merely reach out and pluck one that interests you. Drinkers are talkers; this is probably the best place to practice." With that Impa sank into a deep silence, ears twitching slightly.

Link followed her example, leaning against the bar, letting his ears pick up what they willed. He sat in silence for a while, listening to the meaningless blur of words flow over him. He furrowed his brow in frustration, trying desperately to pick out one conversation over another, but it wasn't until he was ready to give up and just let his ears wander that he heard anything intelligible.

"…what with the King off to Gerudo territory…"

"We'll have to lock our gates again when the hordes come from the west—"

"…and I said to him: 'Look, you might be my husband but what I do with my friends is my own business…"

"… joining the army at that age? Surely they don't allow it…"

The words flew at him in a rapid barrage, and he found he could not follow any one conversation for more than a few sentences before another caught his ear.

"…I wish my father could see…"

"…King'll give those whores what for…"

"…every day…"

"You're quite suspicious, you know that?"

These last words, absurdly loud and incredibly close, jerked Link out of his stupor of concentration. He opened his eyes to see Palo's amused face hovering a few inches from his own. He swallowed, looking for any sign of judgment in the man's intense red eyes. Palo shook his head and stood back, laying his hands on his hips.

"Let him alone," Impa said, turning on her seat to reach for her drink. "He's just practicing."

"What makes you think he _needs_ practice? Are we going to send him to eavesdrop on our foes? Is he our little Hylian spy now?" Link could sense a form of affection beneath Palo's outward derision, and he reddened a little.

"Hush yourself, Palo," Impa said. "We don't want to be overheard ourselves. We might find ourselves delayed on our journey if we speak too carelessly."

Talm appeared at Palo's side. "Right. And father does not appreciate being kept waiting."

Impa smiled and took a sip, glancing over at Link. "Tomorrow we ride straight for the Gerudo River Valley. We won't be stopping until we get to the bridge. So rest yourself, and prepare. You will not see a town for a few days."

Link nodded, raising his own drink to his lips, eyebrows drawing together. It was not so much concern for himself, his own tiredness or removal from civilization, but the wellbeing of their already overdriven horses. He would owe them several good scrubbings by the time they got to the desert.


	22. The Women of the Silk Bridge

"Those men who turn their humble eyes to earth  
May see the ancient tracks of Ganond King,  
And his fell insurgent legions' riders  
Repair to eastern reaches of water.  
He leaves in wake a trail of golden road,  
By wildfire tempered, by red blood imbued  
With wealth of worm-silk, and steel-carved jewel;  
Behold his road of riches, and marvel."

Dietrich Aren, from "The March of the Conqueror King"

* * *

The dry, red rocks of the Gerudo River Valley glowed almost like embers in the setting sun. A few desperate, weedy plants gripped the dimples in the rocks, roots clinging to the cracks running up the cliffside of the orange gully. Large grey birds nested in twisted, stunted junipers, squawking at Link as he rode past. He took off his hat and wiped some sweat from his forehead, urging his horse along the side of the canyon, trying not to look too closely at the river that twisted far below him. Impa had told him this was technically the realm of Faron, although the actual forests were far to the south—the valley between Hyrule and the Gerudo Territories was something of a masterless land, and it certainly seemed it.

To the south, Link made out a glint of light. It was squat and wide, spanning the length of the river valley, slightly sloped at the top. Impa must've seen him squint in the distance, since she nudged her horse alongside his and leaned over.

"That's the Silk Bridge," she told him. "The city of Silk itself is a few miles south of it. We could cross there, but sightseeing is not our first priority."

"Perhaps on the way back," Talm put in, "we can visit it. We can see the gardens that hang over the valley like a waterfall of vines. And the statues—" her eyes brightened with the distant look of recollection. "The statues are fantastic. And the whole city is just hanging over the valley like a bridge, you know; nothing but air between the streets and the Gerudo River."

"The whole thing used to be a bridge," Palo put in, "built by some carpenter's guild, back in the day when Hyrule didn't much like the Gerudos. But only a few months after Ganond came rolling over the valley with his army, the traders came. Apparently what they had stolen from Hyrule over the years, they were now ready to sell back to us."

"It's not like they _stole_ their wormsilk," Impa said. "We couldn't get it anywhere else but from them."

"And after the silk came," Talm continued, "the bridge got a complete makeover. Desert marble was brought in from the Territories, they started building into the walls of the valley, started building trading posts on the bridge—then the houses came, then the artisans, then the poets and florists… Now it's a real town. It got so crowded they had to build another bridge, just for travelers who don't want to get stuck in the bazaars."

"Isn't Irma from there?" Link asked, and Talm laughed.

"Oh, no. She's not that lucky. If she'd been born there, no doubt she wouldn't have been so desperate to escape this province with our father. No, she's from some backwater village outside the city. But whenever I'm back here, I try to buy a yard of something nice for her. Usually whatever silk I buy gets remade into something I can wear."

"You should see her collection of cowls," Palo said. "It's horrendous."

Impa nudged her horse into a quick trot and called back over her shoulder, "As much as I would love to berate Talm for her excess, we have little time for idle conversation."

Palo shook his head and closed his mouth, urging his mount after Impa's. They sped across the cliffside, taking care not to steer too close to the red precipice, winding around the straggly weeds and occasional dry tree that squatted in their way. They had ridden straight west from Riverton, through the flat fields, jumping fences when they had to pass through the territory of some rancher or another, and they hadn't yet returned to the real road.

But as the bridge drew closer, and Link could make out the intricacies of its pink marble arches, the polished wood, the statues that stood tall at either end, he could see a wide, paved road across it, leading into the west. On the other side of the valley, it snaked between two bare red mountains, white as a pearl, and disappeared into the haze of the desert.

Link kept his eye on that road as they drew nearer to the bridge. When he and his companions cantered up to the two large marble pillars on the east side, he took a moment to distract himself with the intricately carved arch between them. Large, curving words were embossed in the stone, but he couldn't read them. At first disappointed with his own illiteracy Impa tried so hard to correct, it took a moment for him to realize the letters were not Hylian at all. He raised his eyes from the foreign, curved letters, and settled them on the white statue that stood atop the arch.

As he rode under the arch and onto the bridge proper, dusty horse's hooves miraculously leaving no mark on the light stone, he looked above him at what appeared to be a marble woman. She faced the west, arm outstretched in greeting, long hair pulled back into a large bun. She looked like a younger, infinitely wealthier version of Irma—her marble dress was decked in jewels and her delicate white arm, outstretched to the desert, was adorned in bracelets and decorative strips of lace.

Link watched the statue for as long as he could. His horse seemed content on following its companions, since there was nowhere else to go but over the side of the bridge, into the white water far beneath. So he let go of the reins and turned to watch the statue shrink on the other side of the valley. Slowly, they approached the west end of the bridge, almost identical—the marble was of a different sort, a darker pink than the previous pillars, and the woman who stood proud atop the western arch was a wholly different creature than her sister across the river.

She was tall, short hair falling across her jeweled forehead, over her hooked nose and large lips. She reached to the east, toward Hyrule, but she seemed a different sort of woman than her counterpart—from her long, sharp fingernails, the large rings on her fingers, to the thick, almost fetter-like bracelets on her wrists. She wore no dress, but instead covered her chest with a thin band of cloth, her belly adorned with beads and strings of jewels. Her wide breeches flared out at the bottom and ended at a pair of curl-toed boots. As Link rode under her outstretched arm, he tried to catch more glimpses of her, but he soon passed through the arch of the bridge, and officially landed in Gerudo Territory.

"Onrago is at the end of this road," Impa said to him, when he finally tore his attention from the beautiful statues. "Our camp is far east of it—or at least the messenger said so."

"Will there be many Sheikah there?" Link asked.

"There aren't many Sheikah anywhere," Palo said, unhelpfully.

Impa preferred to stay silent. She just urged her horse into a gallop and rode along the paved road. A few miles from the bridge, darkness fell, and they made camp well off the main thoroughfare. Despite the dry surroundings, the strange smells and noises of foreign animals in the darkness, Link slept through the night, and could barely rouse himself when Impa shook him awake.

They resumed their journey, galloping along the road until Impa halted them. She reigned in her horse and motioned for them to look north. Link followed her extended finger and spied a gully opening up in the mountains, dark and somewhat foreboding. Impa made a sharp turn into this small canyon, abandoning the road and galloping into the barren shadows of sharp rock. Link followed her, despite the hesitation he could feel in his horse's gait, in the way it turned its head. He could understand why it would be reluctant to enter a dark canyon, devoid of any plant life but a few desperate weeds clinging to the rocks, but he urged it on.

The crags were so narrowly divided, apart from about an hour around noon when the sun crept directly above the canyon, the trip was shrouded in shadow, the high cliffs and higher mountains blocking the sky. They rode for so long Link was sure they were lost, and when Impa slowed her horse and dismounted, he followed suit, thinking she was going to consult her map. Instead she scanned the cliffs around her with narrowed eyes, before stepping forward, dropping her horse's reins and hopping on top of a small boulder.

She raised her hands to her mouth and an owl's hoot came from it. It was a short call, but it echoed across the small canyon in great leaps of sound. Impa stood still, ears pricked up, and when a similar call came back to her, she shouted to the canyon, "I am Talporom's daughter, of the Sheikah! I have come to aid you!"

Her voice seemed absurdly loud, crossing the canyon as it did, addressing no one. But after a few seconds, Link could make out a silhouette poke from the rocks, and a deep, female voice called back. "Talporom's daughter of the Sheikah, must you be so loud? We can hear you just fine."

Palo laughed heartily, and his voice joined the echoes. He shut himself up and looked over at a reddening Impa, who pulled herself back onto her horse just as a brown-cloaked figure jumped from the rocks to land in front of them.

She carried a spear in her dark-skinned hand, and Link could see braids of bright red hair fall from the crest of her hood. She lifted her face and smiled, her lips colored a dark purple, and waved them forward. "I hope you're better at fighting than you are at subtle greetings," she said. "Because we certainly have need of aid."

* * *

The black smoke of the city factories swirled and billowed above the distant palace. The winds of spring blew through the streets, bringing the chill but not the freshness of the hills from which they arrived.

Sheim tugged his cloak tighter around him, and made his way out of the brick apartment and onto the cobblestone street. No eyes saw him emerge from the doorway and slip back into the shade of an adjacent alleyway, no ears heard the soft click of his shoes against the cobblestones. He was nothing more than a shadow passing under the eye, a distant sound, a second thought. He slipped from darkness to darkness expertly, unheeded.

He looked down at himself and noticed he had left a drop of blood on his gloves. He sighed and wiped the small droplet away.

 _It seems I grow clumsy in my old age_ , he said to himself. He leaned against a wall, gathering his wits. Shouts of the constabulary echoed down the boulevard and a few guards rushed past. Sheim slipped into the cracks in the walls, listening to the clink of armor dissipate. When it was again safe for him to emerge, he made his way down the street, head down, hands folded.

It had been a long and bloody few weeks. Although his targets had been widely dispersed and disparate in station, it did not take long for the authorities to recognize a string of assassinations when they saw one. Keeping them off his heels had been easy enough—it was tracking down all Balras' informants and comrades that had proven difficult. Following the death of the doctor, his contacts and subordinates had scattered like roaches into the cracks and crevices of the city. Sheim supposed he should have been flattered, since their fear made plain their certainty of his success, but he lamented always being the one called in to clean up the messes of his younger and infinitely clumsier kin. His reputation as a killer preceded him, which was not so much to his advantage.

He wiped a few raindrops from his face, brushing his fingers over his thick red tattoos, and sidled into a dark alley. He descended a small set of steps into a shady, tiny courtyard, whose walls and awnings cast long shadows over the wet ground. Built into the far wall was a thick oak door, studded and reinforced, black metal bars protecting its slit of a window. Sheim slinked up to the door and knocked thrice, uttering a nonsensical phrase when the window slid open and a pair of eyes asked him for proof of his legitimacy. With the loud click of several locks, the door swung slowly inward, and Sheim stepped inside the smoky den.

Ten men and seven women lounged in the darkness. Four of them stood over a table, discussing the details of a faded map, tracing the route of the King's march toward Gerudo territory, their whispers harsh and pointed. A man and what Shiem had gathered from many visits to this bar must be his sister got into a quiet, heated argument about economic policy. A couple of well-dressed women spoke quietly in the darkness, each holding a cigarette between gloved fingers.

Plenty of people here recognized him as a usual ornament; he didn't speak much with them, but he knew the owner of the establishment, and if she said he was welcome, he was welcome. They all spoke freely here, in the safe company of their comrades. The milieu did not encourage them to stay silent—the contents of the bar loosened their lips regarding more things than the military strategies of the King.

Sheim seated himself at the bar and without a word the barmaid slid him his usual libation before slipping back into the shadows as quickly as she appeared. He raised the plain rice wine to his lips and took a sip, lifting his head just slightly to hear the conversation of the two ladies behind him. After a few minutes of meaningless small-talk, heard a familiar name.

"I heard it was Balras himself who sold out dear Daph to the palace guard."

"It's no surprise that bastard doctor disappeared as he did, then. And his friends—you've no doubt heard of what's happened to them."

"Of course, and I'm certain it was one of us—though I can't say who."

Sheim never got joy out of hearing his own exploits. He just sipped his wine and focused on the conversation.

"And Daph's _daughter_ , the poor thing."

"Did they ever find her body?"

"I don't think so—but it's not like anyone really knew her. Daph kept her locked away for so long it was like she'd disappeared entirely."

"And to think the royalists would know about her—and try to use her as a bargaining chip. What sort of people do they take us for, to abandon our cause for her sake?"

"I heard from my contact in the King's guard that when they broke into Daph's place, they were utterly surprised to find he even _had_ a daughter. They had meant to use him as leverage, but someone got hasty during the arrest and accidentally thrust a sword through him."

"Bless his poor soul."

"The girl was all Haema had left to bargain with. Do you remember his letter of ultimatum? Dreadful."

"Desperate. If it had been Daph on the chopping block, that may have been one thing. But his poor daughter? She had no idea. And, frankly speaking, little worth."

 _If only they knew her worth,_ Sheim thought. _If only they knew what the kingdom had lost the day she died_. He finished his drink. Another appeared before him almost instantaneously.

"Goddesses' love—this is why I didn't have children. Can't have them caught up in all this, you know."

"I heard he had her well before he joined our cause. That was before his wife died. He was quite lonely after that, I recall."

"I remember those times. We were close for a few years—that's how I knew he even had a daughter at all, but I didn't have time for him. I had pamphlets to publish, meetings to attend."

"I heard his last conquest was the wife of a factory overseer."

"Really? Was she one of us?"

"Of course not. Her husband is an incorrigible royalist. The King's most faithful citizen. But that isn't the worst part."

"Is it not? It's already quite dismal."

"The very same week old Daph died, she gave birth. She had previously been unable to with her husband."

"Oh dear. You're not suggesting—"

"Quite dramatic this lot is getting, isn't it?"

"So much so I say we break off and start our own resistance."

"I'd be glad to, my dear."

"To us, then. To our new campaign."

The two women laughed and clinked glasses, and Sheim drained his own. A burning feeling gathered at the pit of his stomach, wholly separate from his wine. He stepped away from the bar and made his way back to the door. He stopped at it for a moment, eyeing the man who guarded it. The large Hylian nodded in approval, arms crossed, bald head shining in the dim candlelight.

Sheim stepped outside, back into the rain, silencing his beating heart. Of course, for decades, the Sheikah had followed all of the lineages of possible successors to the old royal family, and found them all empty. Sheim himself had traced all the known lovers of the late scion of the old royal family. No children had shown up besides his first daughter, whom he had secreted away for years.

Of course word of this mysterious affair had not cropped up until now. It had not been relevant, as soon as they found out he'd had a daughter. They had to focus their energies on her. And if this other child had been born at the time of his death, of course they would have no information on that development either. Gods, if only they'd had more allies, more of their own kind, they might be able to gather this kind of ancillary information. But it seemed there were too many tasks and too few Sheikah to complete them.

Sheim tried not to let his hopes rise. He walked through the rain, slipping his hands in his pockets. He would have to compose his message with the utmost caution. He couldn't bear to see Merel so disappointed again.

But she needed to know. Normally Sheim would not care to concern himself with the matters of reproduction, but he'd make an exception for the royal family (he'd been a sore disappointment to the efforts of the tribe to build itself back up to former numbers, preferring instead to keep the company of another man. Despite the elder's approval of their union, the steady undertone of extinction haunted them both, until the spirits themselves gifted him with a foundling girl, white as the moon, abandoned to the elements. Even now, at thirty, his daughter Elpi complained to him of experiencing the same sort of unspoken sentiment from others in her tribe: _make haste, woman, and breed_ ).

At least _someone_ was breeding. Someone quite important, if they were lucky. He tried to steady his heart as he made his way down a side street to a small office. The building was practically crumbling to pieces, caked in bitumen from the factory air, windows cracked and shutters broken. Yet it was the safest place he knew of when it came to passing along confidential and coded information.

When he entered the small shop, a bell rang above the door. A paranoid-looking man poked his head out from behind a curtain. When Sheim removed his hood and the man spied a familiar face beneath it, he relaxed.

Sheim shook some of the rainwater from his cloak and approached the counter. "I need parchment and ink, and a cypher. I'm writing a letter to Kakariko."


	23. Moonlight and Shadow

"Of all social hierarchal structures in this great land, the Gerduo matriarchy is one of the most intriguing. Unlike any other tribe in Hyrule, a Gerudo's racial legitimacy depends on his or her gender. Women born of Gerudo mothers are always Gerudo, regardless of paternal parentage. Men born of Gerudo mothers are never such—they are only half. They are often born with lighter skin and duller hair than their female counterparts, suggesting, as my colleagues in anthropology attest, that outward indicators of Gerudo ancestry are heavily linked to sex. There is only one true Gerudo man born into the people at any time, and he is their undisputed King."

Lady Ronia of the House of Faron, _The Historical Atlas of the Peoples of Hyrule_

* * *

The small camp smelled of fire and steel. Tents haphazardly dotted the lee side of a red hill, safe from prying eyes and listening ears. Red-haired women sat around small fires, sharpening and polishing the curved blades of long spears, twisting skewers of meat in the smoke. A few paused to look at Link and his companions, eyeing them for a few seconds before expressionlessly going back to their work.

A young girl relieved them of their mounts. She must've been no older than thirteen, but she wore the same type of armor as her elders, carried the same curved sword at her narrow hip. It looked absurdly big dangling from her belt, but she bore it with the same import as the other soldiers. As she led the horses away, Link could not help but think of the Capital, and its wealth of girls like her—girls of Gerudo ancestry, usually lighter-skinned than their desert counterparts, perhaps dressed differently, but with that same fierce look in their eyes. When he had lived in the city, he had never known why they looked (and at the time, smelled) differently than other people of other shades, but that was before he'd learned of heritage, ancestry, and invasion.

Their guide led them to the largest tent, flanked by two guards decked in gold and leather armor. An incomprehensible, muffled flurry of voices came from inside, and the woman gave the two guards a frustrated look before holding back the flap for Link. He ducked under it and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark interior. He blinked a few times, and the image of a round, low table came into view. A large, well-dressed Gerudo woman sat at its head, hand on her cheek, yellow eyes lowered to what appeared to be a map, spread out and smoothed over the wood surface. She twisted a piece of thin red hair between her long fingernails, gold bracelets tinkling. She stayed silent while those around her, a half-dozen armored Gerudo and two Sheikah, talked furiously.

"Two is not enough to retrieve our soldiers," one of the Sheikah said, a tall woman with grey streaks in her hair. Her companion, a young man, nodded in eager agreement.

"Well _someone_ ought to do it. We're not rats that can sneak through the shadows as you do," a Gerudo warrior replied. "Either you go, or we raid it ourselves, head on—"

"And we all die horribly," another Gerudo finished.

Their guide announced herself before the conversation could continue. "If two Sheikah is not enough, I have brought four more." Link's heart lifted a little when he heard himself counted among them. None of his companions offered to correct the guide, and she continued unimpeded. "Talporom's daughter and her company arrived this afternoon."

"I'd hardly call four a 'company,'" said one of the Gerduo, but the Sheikah stood up and greeted them with what seemed like relief.

"I'm glad to see all three of you," the older Sheikah said. Her eyes glanced briefly to Link, passed over him, then settled back on Impa.

"What news of my father?" Impa asked.

"He was captured, with a few dozen others, in our last raid. He's at the King's camp, if he's still alive."

"If?" Talm spat.

The woman hesitated for a moment. "The King announced he'd kill one prisoner a day until we forfeited and gave him Onrago."

"How long ago was that?" Impa asked.

"Five days."

Link gulped, and the woman lay a hand on Impa's shoulder. "I've no doubt the King will refuse to discard your father easily. He is too valuable." When Impa lowered her head, she continued, "It will have to be a flawless operation, but with five of us, we might be able to infiltrate the King's camp and free them."

"I can help," Link said, before he could stop himself. The older woman looked at him, red eyes narrowing. He bit his lip but stood firm. The small token of courage the elder had given him pressed against him slightly in his breast pocket.

"Is this your stableboy, Impa?" the woman asked. When Impa looked up at her, wide-eyed, she smiled. "Word travels fast in Sheikah circles, you of all people should know."

Impa swallowed. "Yes."

"Do you trust him?"

She glanced at him, whitish eyebrows drawn together, little wrinkles of a scowl at the corners of her mouth. She looked as if she was thinking deeply. "I do."

"Wait a minute," Palo said. "This kid's had a few months of training and you want to send him into the King's camp? That's like throwing a guppy in the shark's mouth."

Link did not quite understand the simile, but his heart sank a little hearing it.

"We'll be here to protect him, Palo," Talm said. "And six is better than five. If anything he'll make a great distraction—" Impa gave her a look that killed her frivolous words in her throat.

"As with all things," one of the Gerudo warriors started, "we defer to Ahnadib."

All eyes turned to the Gerudo woman sitting at the head of the table. She crossed her plump arms and leaned back, colored lips wrinkling in thought. The jewels on her forehead clinked, bracelets clattered, her rings clicked as she stroked her chin—her whole body seemed a rattling, thinking instrument for one long moment.

"Tomorrow at dusk, we will send the six to the King's camp," she said. Her voice was deep, raspy with the weight of age and command. "A company of horsewomen will await them on the northern slopes, to carry them to Onrago. In the meantime we will move out. We will avoid the road and meet you at the city. If that bastard wants to come retrieve his prisoners, he'll come this way first. We'll be long gone by then."

The Gerudo warriors bowed to her and resumed their study of the map—their Sheikah companions leaning by their sides, discussing routes of retreat and hiding places, of rendezvous points inside Onrago and which units to send where. They chattered on in a mixture of languages—Link did his best to pick out the Hylian from what he assumed was Gerudo, although the warriors spoke quickly, raising their voices to drown one another out. He stored the unknown words, he listened carefully to the known, and tried his best to follow along with his new comrades.

When Impa led him out of the tent, he watched her face carefully. He hadn't picked up all the details of the mission from the jumbled mess of pidgin languages, but he had no trouble interpreting the worry on her face. Her eyes traced the paths many armored feet had trodden through the red sand, her mouth curled into a thoughtful frown. Because he had nothing better to do, he reached out and touched her wrist.

"I'm sure he's alive," Link told her, forcing a smile. The way her eyes lit up at his reassurance (although he was sure they were both aware it was mere pretense) relieved him—to some degree.

But something in the back of his mind kept crawling forward, in the shape of the King. He tried to stifle the possibility that he would run into the esteemed monarch on this rescue mission—if he performed his duty, they would be in and out of the King's camp, prisoners in tow, before anyone even noticed the intrusion. He wouldn't run into the King—he wouldn't let himself make as big a mistake as that (besides, Impa would be furious with him if he did). He'd just help get Talporom out of the camp and make his merry way west, to Onrago.

He had no doubt that would be exactly how it would play out. But his heart did not listen to his reasoning—it pattered on, seemingly indifferent to the powerful charm of courage that lay against it, resting in his pocket.

* * *

When Impa, Palo, Talm and the other two Sheikah slipped out of their tribal garb into dark suits of flexible material, Link found he had nothing to change into. The white strips of cloth around his arms and his Sheikah leggings would only reflect the bright desert moon—his scarf and worn tabard were too bright a grey to disappear into shadow. So the best he could do was remove what clothes were too bright, replacing them with any dark garments the Gerudo had to spare.

His sword and shield would be too cumbersome for a mission in which stealth was imperative. The only weapon he carried was a small knife, Gerudo in origin, given to him by one of the soldiers. The other Sheikah, of course, had their own.

He was a little embarrassed he had come so woefully underprepared for subterfuge, but after all, he had left Kakariko in quite a hurry. When he had adorned dark clothes, mostly civilian in nature, he tucked the charm the elder had given him into his waistband and followed Impa out into the night.

The older Sheikah woman instructed them closely as they snuck through the darkness. "We will send Palo to the south end of the camp to create a diversion," she hissed, her speech unhindered by the effort of running. "Talm will scout for us while we infiltrate the north end of the camp—Impa will take care of the guards—there should be two, but I'll handle the rest if there are any more—and we'll be in and out of there before the King can blink." The woman glanced behind her at the party. "Do we all know where to meet?"

They all nodded. In truth, Link wasn't entirely sure, but if it happened to be a large company of horsewomen, he wouldn't have a hard time sniffing out their mounts. He just steadied his breath, tried to remember his training as best he could, and slinked off after them, toward the distant lights of the King's camp.

A deep silence fell over all six of them when they reached the tents at the perimeter. They crouched behind a particularly large boulder, and their leader sent Palo off to the south. He gave them a quick salute and ran into the darkness, silent as air.

Link felt someone squeeze his hand. He looked over at Impa, lower half of her face covered in black cloth, nodding at him. He nodded back, returning the touch, before all five of them crept out from behind the rock into the hazardous empty ground between their hiding place and the camp. The moon shone brightly across the featureless sand, casting their shadows long and conspicuous across the weedy sands. Link was sure that despite their silent march, scouts would spy their forms traverse the hillside, and release a warning cry or a barrage of whistling arrows.

But all was silent. When they arrived at the north end of camp, Link could make out the orange glow of fires, the shadows of men walking, talking, cast thick and brownish against the white tents. The sound of blades against whetstones filled the air, and a sweet, mouthwatering smell wafted from the center of camp, mixing with the smoke. Link crept behind Impa, heart pounding in his throat, and slipped into the shade of a tent, leaning over to watch a few men lounge around a fire.

They sat half-armored, talking comfortably, passing a small flask between them. A fourth man, tall and lean and helmeted, tightened the straps on his armor. "Always the night watch, isn't it?" he grumbled. Link had to strain his ears to hear the man; he moved position, and in doing so shifted some of the dry earth beneath him.

One of the men turned his head in Link's direction, and he held his breath. He could almost feel Impa's anger, could sense her muscles tensing in anticipation of either a short fight or a long flight.

The peal of a deep gong sounded through the camp, and Link nearly jumped out of his skin. He drew in a sharp breath, but the commotion around him masked his noise. The three men by the fire stood up, reaching for their weapons, but it was toward the south they looked. The fourth man concerned himself only with strapping on his gauntlets.

A cry came out from a few yards away, and a disheveled archer skipped up to the men and saluted. "Something big is crawling around the south of camp," she said. "Some sort of animal."

"What?"

"It's not a…" muttered one of the men. "It's not a sandworm, is it?"

The remaining four looked at him a moment before they burst out laughing. The man flushed before he put on his helmet and followed the archer and the other soldiers to the south of camp, where no doubt Palo was making some ridiculous show of himself. The fourth man stood guard at the far tent, sighing. He straightened his back and held his spear at his side, keeping watch over the small, abandoned fire.

The Sheikah woman gave Impa a nod, and she turned around, grabbing Link's wrist and creeping off into the shadows, beyond the sightline of the guard. As Link followed her, a purposeful sense of belonging washed over him. Communicating only with gestures, with looks and subtle body language was almost more comfortable to him than words—in the deep silence of his mission, it was almost like being deaf again. He could nearly feel his other senses heighten at the mere thought—he swore he could smell the sweat of the night guard, could smell the fear and desperation of the prisoners in the tent behind him.

And he could smell the man that crept up on them now, without Impa's knowledge. As she stepped beside the tent, extending herself to her full height and plunging her knife into the soft spot under the night guard's helmet, Link turned around completely. His eyes left the glint of Impa's knife in the firelight, the twitch of the startled guard, and landed on a swish of nothing more than darkness against darkness. He saw the flash of a javelin before he saw the soldier that stalked them, and before their pursuer could make a noise to call his fellows, before he could raise the weapon and thrust it toward them, Link drew his small knife and hurled it clumsily toward their attacker.

It planted itself in the man's throat, and he fell to the ground with a soft thump. Impa, after dispatching her own enemy, turned to the sound. She made an almost comical face—he guessed it might've been pride at his quick throw, perhaps a little disappointment that he hadn't seen the guard coming sooner. But she said nothing, and gave no further sign of her feelings. After signaling to Talm hidden in the shadows opposite the fire, Impa drew back the flap of the prisoner's tent and stepped inside.

A group of people sat on the floor of the large tent, wrists bound to one another's and lashed to the poles that supported the small structure. Most of them looked Gerudo—women and some men with dark skin and red hair, but a few were distinctly Sheikah. They all lifted their eyes as Impa walked in, the nearest one hissing in earnest: "Two in here."

Impa and Link turned to their immediate right, to the corner nearest the entrance, and saw two guards. Dice and a few gold pieces sat on the table between them—it looked like they had abandoned their gambling at the appearance of an unwelcome guest, preferring instead to draw their swords.

 _A small space is detrimental for a longsword's wide, slow swings_ ; Link could remember Impa teaching him as much, and there was no better demonstration than the one she gave him at that moment. Before blades even left scabbards, Impa cut the two of them down in what seemed to be one smooth, elegant motion. Her eyes flashed with that strange power he had seen in the King's palace, as if she had put aside all empathy to successfully cut down those in her way.

With the guards dead, and Talm at the entrance, they turned their attention to the prisoners. Impa stepped toward the group, wiping her bloodied knife on her pant leg before kneeling and cutting through the ropes that held them together.

One of the Gerudo warriors opened her mouth, smiling, and by the look in her eyes, Link knew she was ready to sing Impa praises. Fortunately, one of her compatriots clapped his hand over her mouth, keeping her joyful noise trapped inside. She quieted down as Talm knelt next to her, cutting through her bonds.

Link, without a knife, just watched as the ropes fell away, and each prisoner stood, the healthy helping the injured to their feet in silence. A Shiekah man stepped forward, away from the group, ankles unfettered from his fellows, but hands still tied in front of him. He was tall, with a somber face, an aquiline nose and tattoos matching some of Elder Merel's: a small geometric mark between his eyebrows, and a thick, inverted triangle under his chin. He offered his arms out to Impa, and she slid the knife between his wrists, cutting away the rope in one quick motion.

Arms free, he scooped both her and her sister up in one grand motion, pulling them to his broad chest and holding them close. They returned the gesture, taking care to keep their knives out of the way of his powerful embrace. Link looked at the man's face as he buried it between the sisters' heads—his furrowed brow wrinkling his red tattoo, his wide, frowning mouth, the way he nuzzled the girls' shoulders—and he knew this was Talporom.

Link had to admit he'd imagined the man a little differently, but after he stared at Talporom for a few fractions of a second (for that's all the time the man gave him before he broke off from his daughters and motioned for the other prisoners to follow him), the old image he had disappeared, replaced by this tall, dark-skinned warrior.

Their eyes met for a moment. Talporom's intense gaze locked onto Link's, and he picked him apart, painfully quickly. Link felt utterly vulnerable for a hideously long second, before the man released him from his stare and turned his attention back to the escape. Link swallowed, perhaps a little too loudly, before following the last prisoner out of the tent and into the weak light of the fire.

They turned to the left and silently (except for the occasional clumsy shuffle of a Gerudo or two) made their way between a row of tents, toward the northwest end of the camp, toward freedom. Impa left Talm to lead the prisoners and fell back to Link, reaching out and tapping his elbow.

He looked into her concerned eyes, and nodded. _Everything is fine_. Link couldn't help but believe himself. They had released around two dozen prisoners, raised no alarm, and he hadn't caught one glimpse of the King. Impa smiled, the warrior's look in her eyes leaving for a moment, and he felt the hideous tension in his stomach relent a little. He almost dared to relax, to take a deep breath, to celebrate the fact that they now had a straight shot to freedom, when a clicking of armored boots on the rocky sand made him turn.

Behind them stood a guard, spear ready, helmet askew. He opened his mouth to call out to his comrades, but Impa was already there, slashing at him with her stained knife. He jumped back, parrying once, twice, releasing a rallying cry before she jabbed the dagger into his throat. She pulled it out and started to run, motioning for Link to follow her. He did, panting as the sounds of approaching guards grew louder—men started to emerge from their tents, started to sprint back over to this side of the camp from the south, where the creature was deemed a false alarm. The prisoners had disappeared far ahead of him, which Link took as a good sign. Even Impa was outrunning him, twisting around tents, vaulting barrels with ease, barely touching the ground as she disappeared into the darkness beyond camp.

Link approached the edge of the encampment—limbs flailing, lungs shriveling. He knew his panicked run was clumsy, hazardous, but he had to make it to the darkness, he had to—

Something wrapped around his arm. Its end flailed in the air for a second, and with a horrifying snap, latched itself to his skin. Pain shot from his arm, and he glanced over to see a barbed whip pull tight around his bicep. The soldier with the whip yanked him back, twisting him in midair. His arm throbbed, his head spun, and he hit the rocky sand with a painful thud.

His vision reddened and blurred, and he tried to force himself to his knees, but the whip pulled his arm and he again fell forward into the sand. He could barely lift his head to see a band of soldiers surround him, spears and swords and axes pointed his way.

His heart stopped for a moment. His thoughts blurred and left him, snuffing out like candles and abandoning him to darkness. He froze, breath stuck in his aching lungs, and he sat petrified for a long moment before he could regain some semblance of cognition.

He knew he had no other choice. Moving his arms slowly, careful not to pull too hard against the whip lest its owner yank him back again, he moved his legs under him. He pushed himself to his knees, only to fall back into the sand. Forehead touching the ground, hands clasped above his head, Link grit his teeth and lowered himself into a supplicant bow, common to the servants of the Dragmire family.


	24. An Irreparable Failure

"Whoever said discretion was the better part of valor has not read many stories of heroes."

Sir Yaerin of House Elanor, Royal Chevalier

* * *

Link did not know what to expect. He could have a spear thrust through his side at any moment, could have the coil of a whip around his neck and squeeze the life from him, he could have his head removed entirely before he even felt pain.

He was not a boy of extraordinary daring. As he threw himself to the ground, pressing his forehead into the sand, he knew it was the only thing he could've done. He was not sure whether it was merely to salvage his own safety, or to facilitate the escape of Impa and the others, but as soon as he completed his bow, kneeling for a few seconds before lifting his eyes, he knew he was not at risk of immediate execution.

The soldiers lowered their weapons, what little portions of their faces visible under their helmets contorted in confusion. One of them, presumably a captain, ordered some of the others to resume the pursuit, and sheathed his sword.

"What the hell is this?" he muttered, looking Link over.

"Hylian, sir," one of the soldiers answered, somewhat unhelpfully.

"Gods damn it, I know that. He ain't Gerudo or one of 'em savages."

Hushed words of several confused soldiers hovered over him. Questions of his origin and reasoning poured unanswered from busy mouths; why did he bow? Was he running from or chasing the intruders? Did anyone know him?

The captain kicked Link's side. "Get up and explain yourself."

Link did not.

"Thinks he's a stoic thing, he does," the man growled. "You, and you—"gesturing to two soldiers—"haul the bastard upright." Rough arms gripped Link's and pulled him to his feet. The captain started to interrogate him, swiftly and ineffectually, growing more agitated by the second. Link kept his eyes lowered, lips drawn taut. He told himself to let the questions fly past his ears as if he couldn't hear them at all.

"Sir." A spearman in the forefront interrupted the captain's flurry of increasingly profanity-laced inquiries. "I think I recognize him. I think he belongs to Gorman at the stables. He ain't answering 'cause he's simple, or something."

"Gorman, then?" the captain's mouth tightened into a restrained frown. He narrowed his eyes at his mysterious prisoner, but the heat of his confused anger evaporated at the explanation. "That man's always misplacing his underlings. Take him back to the stables, then."

"I would, sir. But this kid didn't come with us on campaign."

The captain shifted perceptibly. Link kept his eyes focused on the tips of his ratty shoes and clenched his teeth. "Well, that's odd." The man's cold, armored fingers touched Link's shoulder, pulling away the cloth of his shirt and exposing his mark. "He's certainly the King's property."

"Should we return him, then?"

"And disturb His Majesty for a disobedient stableboy? I think not. Just take him back to Gorman."

Fervently, Link prayed a soldier or two would obey the captain's command without comment. Evidently no gods were listening that day.

"Sir, if I may. What if he _was_ with the intruders?" A few eyes turned to an outspoken bowman. "What's the King more likely to punish us for: bringing him an innocent kid out of caution, or failing to bring him one of Ahnadib's spies?"

Link could almost hear the cranks in the captain's head turn. He closed his eyes, hope fading rapidly. Then, after a long moment, "Tie the bastard up and haul him over to the gold tent. He's got some explaining to do. The rest of you, get the hounds and off to the chase."

Someone grasped Link's arms and yanked them behind his back. One pair of hands pulled a thick cord around his wrists, while another searched him for weapons. His only knife was still stuck in the bloodied throat of the soldier he'd killed, and it had been barely anything more than a toy, sheathless and without worth. He had no sword, he had no shield, he did not even have the proper vestments for battle or stealth—just a patchwork assortment of intercultural civilian clothes. He had nothing incriminating on him, save perhaps the small charm Merel had given him, and that posed no threat to the soldiers.

As he was prodded forward by the sharp tip of a spear, he could not help but lament how the charm had failed him. He hadn't wanted to throw himself on the ground and surrender, but he didn't have another option. He would've much fought his way through the soldiers and fled into the wilderness with Impa—

Oh gods, she would be absolutely livid. He could hear her reprimands in his head, lengthy and delivered in her stern, deep voice. And Talporom; what sort of impression would he have made, letting himself get captured on his first mission? Goddesses above, Impa had turned to him in that Gerudo tent back at Ahnadib's camp and said she trusted him. It was clear now that she shouldn't have.

He hung his head, more in shame than fear, as he was hauled between the narrow tent rows in the encampment, past fires and curious soldiers. The whinny of horses ready for pursuit and the howl of excited hounds echoed across the camp, forcing a shudder from him.

The captain grasped his elbow and dragged him roughly to a large tent in the center of the bivouac, trimmed in gold and glowing with warmth. Link's stomach knotted deep inside him, and he felt his breath leave his lungs. There was no mistaking the triangular sigil on the material.

The soldiers that escorted him shoved him roughly inside, and he fell to his knees. He barely caught a glimpse of the men gathered around him before he pressed his forehead against the lush red carpet that lined the tent's expansive floor. Link did not have to see the generals, the officers, or the King himself to know all eyes were on him. Nobody spoke for a few long seconds—it may have come as a surprise to be presented with a young, underdressed and unarmed Hylian boy in the middle of a raid.

"Sire," the captain started. A thud next to Link's head told him he'd taken one knee. Out of the corner of his eyes, he spotted the soldier's silver greaves, grains of sand falling from the creases of his boots into the lovely carpet. "I found this one near the site of the escape. He just fell to the ground when we cornered him. He won't answer to us."

For the first time, Link heard the King's voice. His laughter was deep, restrained and noble. When he spoke, a shiver ran through his spine, and he tried his best to hide it. "Of course he won't. He's deaf."

Link heard the slight swish of thick robes, and grit his teeth. He felt the carpet depress, just slightly, and knew the King had stepped forward. He couldn't breathe. He kept his eyes locked onto one small dirt smear in the elegant carpet, and pressed his forehead even harder into the ground. He felt the King's eyes bore into him, and expected the order any second: the sword would come down on his neck, the arrow would pierce his heart, one of the king's officers would walk over and stomp him into the ground until dead.

But when the King's voice came again, filling the tent, it was not with the order to execute him. "Where did you find him?"

"The north end of camp. near the perimeter."

"Was he armed?"

"N… no."

"And he is dressed more like an orphan than a soldier." The King released a short-lived chuckle. "I'm sure he has a most intriguing story to tell, if only he could tell it." The King took a deep breath, silent for a moment, as if in thought. "Captain, excellent work."

A shifting and clinking next to Link—the captain had stood up. "Oh. Was nothing, sire."

"I cannot help but wonder how he found himself here." An uncomfortable silence emanated from the other inhabitants of the tent as the King pondered the possibilities. "One would suspect if he were with Ahnadib, she'd arm him appropriately. But then again, perhaps his presence is an accident…" He seemed to be enjoying this little puzzle, and he tapped his foot as his familiar stableboy lay prostrate before him, sweating. Link wondered if the King merely enjoyed watching him tremble. "Evidently someone lent him some Gerudo clothes. Perhaps Ahnadib, perhaps another rebel faction. But what would drive a boy like this to keep their company?"

The captain, now perhaps a little too comfortable with the King's praise, dared to comment: "Heh, maybe the whores gave him some loving, eh?"

A thick, terrible silence followed the suggestion. Link did not see what transpired when the King moved, but the captain suddenly stumbled back, gasping, armor clinking. A small splatter of something warm landed on Link's neck, and he heard two of the guards rush to drag the captain away. Link went cold, holding himself absolutely still.

"Those are my people you're disparaging," the King said calmly. "Take care to speak of them with a little respect in the future."

Despite the commotion behind him, Link did not lift his head; a deaf boy wouldn't have been concerned with the stifled, agonized noises retreating out of the tent flap behind him. A drop of what he realized must've been the captain's blood dripped down the side of his neck, but he remained perfectly still, perfectly silent.

He shivered when a large hand touched his shoulder. It bunched Link's loose shirt and pulled him up in one strong motion, placing him on his trembling feet. Even at his tallest, Link stood well below the King's shoulders; the most he could see of him was his wide black tabard, gilded with the sigil of his house. Link lowered his eyes, swallowing audibly. He spied a small spot of blood on the carpet, and a stained knife in the King's left hand. The right gripped his shoulder, thumb pressing into his brand. A strong smell, thick but pleasant, like the scent of an extinguished match, wafted from the folds of the King's intricately embroidered clothing.

"A mysterious turn of events, indeed," the King said. Link stared at his feet, but he could feel the intense eyes of the monarch pick him apart like a cat toying with its meal.

"What do you wish done with him, sire?" one of the officers asked. "Shall we kill him for you?"

"Not yet," the King said, and Link tried his best to seem ignorant of his words. "He might not be able to give us any information, but I suspect if he's showed up here in such a sorry state, he's been doing his best to come back to us."

"S-sire?" one of the men started.

"I do not know under what circumstances the boy has found himself here; I will inquire of my general the details when he arrives. For now, I sense a test of loyalty is at hand." The King let go of Link's shoulder and turned to his officers, lined up around the wide, circular table. "Besides, I am fair-minded enough to know I owe him a modicum of clemency. He's given me the fastest, most fearless warhorse I've ever had the pleasure of riding."

Link knew the small swell of pride in his chest was misplaced, inappropriate for the moment, but he couldn't stop its advance. He just did his best to try not to show he'd heard the King praise him. He locked his eyes on the ground and left them there, expressionless.

The King approached the table, gesturing to one of the half-dozen men at the perimeter of the tent. One of them nudged Link forward, to the King's side. His heart fluttered somewhere in his throat as he gazed down on the expansive map of the region. He saw the blue form of the Gerudo Valley River, the icons of Silk and its eponymous bridge, he saw a thin line of road snaking into the red mountains, leading to the city of Onrago. The King leaned over the map, eyes wandering from the large, rectangular representation of their bivouac, back to the east, toward the camp in which Link had safely slept mere hours before. It was not marked on their map, but he could see a few hastily scrawled crosses in the vicinity where evidently the enemy's hideout had not been found.

Link heard noises behind him—footsteps and the swish of the tent flap—but waited until the others turned to the entrance before he followed suit. A young man, who seemed to be something of a scribe, stumbled into the tent and saluted. "Sires, no sign of the escapees, the—"

"Stay here for further instruction," the King told him, before turning back to the table. "No doubt they're heading back to their camp as we speak. Let us see if we cannot beat them there." The King's wide mouth turned up at its corners, but did not break fully into a smile. "Unbind him."

Link almost started at the sound of a knife being drawn behind him, until he reminded himself he was deaf. The blade didn't plunge into him; instead, it slid between his wrists and with a short sawing motion, he was free. Link's hands fell at his sides, and despite his overwhelming urge to rush for the exit, he stood still, staring down at the map with his best befuddled look.

The King turned to him. Instinctively, he looked away, but the man stared at him, burning him under his terrible glare, until he had to lift his eyes. His gaze met the King's, and no words were needed. The resigned look in his yellow irises, the slight motion of his chin, the way his elbow leaned on the corner of the map; Link knew what he wanted.

Link lifted a shaking hand, and it hovered over the map for a moment as he thought furiously. He didn't know if it was late enough in the night that the camp would be packed and fled to Onrago. Perhaps some warriors were still there—but Impa and Palo and the others would not be.

Hand trembling, he traced the route from the King's encampment to the rebel Gerudos'. His finger slid along the map, following the crevices and shadows of the narrow canyon in which they had made camp. His finger landed on the shallow crest between two hills, and he tapped it lightly.

The King looked up at one of his officers, and the man bowed deeply. He put on his black helmet and left the table, taking the waiting messenger boy with him. Link's heart pattered against his ribcage, and he backed away from the table, lowering his hand again to his side.

The King breathed a heavy sigh. "Today may be the day we quell Ahnadib's little rebellion." Link could see a flash of yellow as his eyes turned on him. "If not, the kingdom will be short one stableboy."

Link lowered his gaze and deadened his expression, but he knew the look in the King's eyes. He was meant to understand the threat, regardless of its words.

"Keep him out of our way until word gets back from the scouts."

"Yes, sire," a guard replied. Rough hands gripped Link's arms, and he allowed himself to be led away from the King, out of his tent. He was manhandled all the way to the prisoner's tent at the north end of camp, where he was quickly shoved inside. The bodies of the men Impa had killed had been removed (the morbid thought struck him that they were probably not even cold yet), but a few splatters of their blood remained, staining the tent wall and the small table, the chairs and the set of wooden dice.

Link was thrown down onto the ground, hastily lashed to the tentpole to which Talporom and his company of soldiers had been bound not so long ago, and was left alone. He shifted his arms uncomfortably, and closed his eyes. The stink of violence permeated the tent, along with the mixed scents of sweat, fear and exhaustion that the prisoners left behind. Link looked around him, thinking that it must've been a fair trade—his freedom for theirs.

He thought about what the King's men might find at the location he had given them. They might find Ahnadib, they might kill her and her soldiers, or (and he wasn't quite sure if this was worse or better), they would find nothing, and they would come back and kill him for his treachery.

 _Goddesses above,_ he said to himself. _Either they die or I do. I'm a coward, I'm a filthy coward and I'm still going to die._

He did not know how many hours he sat in lonely darkness. He watched the shadow of the guard outside his tent sway and pace, backlit by the small fire. He watched the shadow rub its neck, take off its helmet and wipe sweat from its forehead, pick its nose a few times. He had its entire bored routine memorized, when a taller figure approached it. They spoke for a few moments, quietly—perhaps groundlessly, they thought their prisoner might be able to hear them—and the guard stepped aside.

Link knew this was the moment the King decided whether or not he should die. He watched the tall shadow carefully, but with a start, realized it was not the broad silhouette of the monarch. There was something oddly familiar about it; the thin neck, the slightly sloping shoulders. When the tent flap was pushed aside and a man entered, Link lifted his eyes to see a face he recognized.

The palace's stable master stood before him, tall and lanky, big eyebrows drawn together. Link swallowed, staring at him, trying to quell the memories that flooded up within him at the mere sight of a familiar face. He wondered if Talon was here as well—or maybe the other stablehands hired to care for the King's horses during his campaign.

Wordlessly, the stable master bent toward him, kneeling beside the tentpole and gently untying him. His wrists fell free at his side, and the stable master helped him up off the ground. The older man looked him over for a second before shaking his head in what seemed like bewilderment. A small, cynical smile appeared on his lips as he led Link out of the dark tent into the light of the fire. Link followed him in silence, the fate of Ahnadib and her soldiers weighing on his mind.

He almost bumped into the man when he stopped in front of the cantonment's stables. It seemed a temporary construction, but sturdy enough—evidently the hands had been put to work digging postholes deep enough to keep the wooden structure standing. The familiar smell of horses and hounds filled his nostrils, and a deep sense of longing overtook him.

The stable master must've seen him eyeing the place for Talon, and shook his head. Link nodded in understanding. His disappointment didn't last long, since before him, led on by an unfamiliar stablehand, the fire-red warhorse sauntered past, white tail flicking in the torchlight.

Link couldn't help himself. He jumped forward, and much to the surprise of the attending stablehand, threw himself at the horse's neck, burying his face in her shoulder. She turned her head, seemingly unsurprised at his sudden appearance, and snorted at his hair contentedly. He ran his hands through her loose mane, curling it between his fingers, and reveled in the feel of her, her strong scent, her kind energy.

His perfect, silent moment with the warhorse was tragically short-lived.

"Who the hell is that?" the other stableman asked.

The stable master's voice was hoarse, as if worn down by the smoke of the Capital, but commanding enough. "He'll be taking over your duties in looking after Epona. King's wishes."

The stablehand backed off, shrugging, and Link stayed firmly attached to the horse, eyes wide. They named her—gods, _who_ named her? Talon, perhaps? Link went over the sound of the monicker in his own head: _E-po-na_ (he knew that wasn't really her name; all animals had signatures much like names, but they were in a language Link, nor anyone else he knew, could speak). He figured Epona was as good a name as any, if she must be called something. Of course, she didn't answer to any name, because when Link trained her, he hadn't given her one. She answered to looks, to nudges, motions and smells—all much more communicative for a horse than mere words.

Link broke away from the animal and grasped her lead, taking a moment to stroke her cheek. She nuzzled his chest, snorting, big black eyes wide, and he couldn't keep himself from smiling. He glanced over to the stable master to see the man shaking his head, arms crossed. Something of a contented smirk hovered over his lips, but it was difficult to make out his face fully in the dim firelight.

The sound of frantic hooves beating the ground echoed through the small stables—Link, of course, pretended not to hear them. A black horse skidded to a halt before the stable master, and a slender man dismounted. He wore a narrow helmet and a longsword over his back.

"Any news?" the stable master asked.

"We just missed them; they might've known we were coming. The embers in the fire pits were still warm. But we think they're off to Onrago. His Highness has called us all back, says we'll just take them out in the town." A wave of relief washed through Link."They sent me back to tell you to get all of your hands up and ready. They'll be quite a few horsemen coming in half an hour or so. Hounds, too." The swordsman handed the reins to the stable master.

"Get the eastern stables to accommodate them. I'll send some of my boys over. There have been a few delicate changes here; orders from the King."

"Is that so?"

The stable master tilted his head suggestively toward Link. He looked away, focusing on Epona's flank, telling himself to act as if he could not hear them.

"What, that kid is our informant?" the man seemed to instinctively lower his voice.

The stable master seemed to have to think about the answer for a moment. "Weirdly enough. I reckon that's what he is."

"War is a strange thing, isn't it?" The man's voice softened as if his mind was wandering. He shook his head, gave the stable master his horse, and saluted. "Thank you, Gorman. I'll see you at mess."

"Keep well," the stable master answered, leading the black horse toward Link and Epona. He looked the two of them over, standing so naturally side-by-side, and shook his head. He spoke with the confidence of a man knowing he will not be heard. "You're one tenacious bastard, stableboy." He paused for a moment. "Welcome home."


	25. The Battle for Onrago

"The autonomous region between the province of Faron and the Gerudo Territories is the site of some of the most fascinating cultural and economic exchanges in the country. The city of Onrago, like many Gerudo towns, once was nothing but a thieves' fortress. But now it stands proud among the burning sands, gilded with the wealth of wormsilk. Its walls are thick and tall, furnished with designs of both Gerudo and Hylian origin, wrought in metal and the pink marble of the region. It stands as a marker that solidifies the once-tenuous friendship between Hyrule and the Gerudo Territories, and will hopefully do so for centuries to come."

Wenstan Illar, "Interprovincial Exchange"

* * *

It was almost as if he'd woken up after a long, dream-flooded sleep. The smell of horses, the pawing of eager hounds, the ache in his back when he finished carrying saddles and bridles to and fro, the stinking surprise when he stepped into a pile of manure—he had thought these particular sensations had left him forever. But they easily returned, easily lulled him back into a sense of his duty, reestablishing his willingness to work in silence and satisfy himself only with the knowledge he'd been of service.

The echoes of his simple, humble past coaxed him into compliance, and after about a week, the guards stopped tying him to the tentpoles at night and let him wander the length of the stables unhindered. He had a watchful eye kept on him at all times (not an unreasonable precaution, since he had reappeared in the King's company quite mysteriously), and there were always more than a few guards around him, making sure he tried nothing suspicious. But they could find no fault with him—after all, the King himself had appointed him the caretaker of the warhorse, and the King made no mistakes. Even the captain that had captured him, now sporting a long, half-healed cut running from the corner of his mouth to his cheekbone, could not find an excuse to report him when he stopped by to snoop. He just narrowed his eyes at Link whenever he saw him, a subtle look of hatred passing through his features (Link figured the man would scowl if he could, but his recent injury prevented him from forming any particularly communicative facial expressions).

Images of Impa, Palo, and Ahnadib left his head for the first few weeks at the stables. He spent most of his time making sure he did not slip up in his duties, since he knew one mistake might land him under the executioner's axe. Any injury, underfeeding or other failure on his part to upkeep the King's animals would cast immediate aspersions on his loyalty, so he worked himself to the bone. He served his function to the best of his ability, as he always had. He spent most of his time with Epona, more often than not had a broom or brush in his hand, and again ate meals that made him miss Irma's cooking terribly. Apart from Talon's absence and the desert landscape, it was just like being at the palace stables again.

But he heard everything. He heard the animals' breath as they slept, he heard the horses' whinnies and the dogs' high whines, he heard the ubiquitous, enthusiastic gossip of the other stablehands. It surprised Link to learn how much of their conversations were devoted to trivialities, and how many words they simply threw away to the wind. He had gone so long without knowing his comrades were so verbose, it almost surprised him. Sometimes they spoke of the horses, sometimes of the campaign, sometimes of their lords and commanders, sometimes of old loves and their home back in Lanayru, sometimes they spoke of Link.

"I thought Talon said he drowned in the moat a few months ago—some accident."

"I heard he followed us all the way here, because he missed that horse."

"I think he's actually _spying_ for us."

Some of their conversations amused him:

"Midna hurt herself on the hunt for the escapees."

"Midna? She one of 'em Gerudos on our side?"

"She's the _dog_ , you dolt. She had a little trampling accident with one of the horses."

Link knew the individual in question. It had taken him a while to recognize her—the night of the raid, when the men and their animals returned from their pursuit of the escapees, he'd been tasked with bandaging the creature's foot. The dog recognized him right away, but he had to take a moment to examine her, to look into her eyes and breathe in her scent, before he realized their shared history. The young dog had ridden through the town in his jacket, wrapped up against the cold, many months ago. She had been a puppy then, and now she was nearly fully grown, but she had immediately recognized him. Had he still been deaf, and still well-practiced in his sharp sense of smell, he was sure he could've returned the favor faster.

But he had to work with the senses he had. He had to admit, with his hearing, some tasks were made easier—he could much more quickly glean the meaning of stablehands when they spoke to him, instead of relying on the movements of their lips and their gestures, he could hear an upset horse from halfway across the stable, he could listen to the particular bark of a hound and interpret its feelings and needs.

But mostly his hearing did nothing but inform him of what was on the other stablehands' minds. Shortly after his return to the stables, the news that colored all the workers' conversations was the arrival General Haema and his men. They had been called from the Capital by the King's request; apparently he had initially given Haema the responsibility of watching over the city while he was gone, but summoned him back to his side after the Gerudo Territories had demonstrated they were not so easily trodden upon.

Link had never heard the name before, but a dire instinct wandered from his gut to his head, showing him the image of the tall general in his white and silver armor, long hair falling from under his helmet over his shoulders. He remembered the dull ache of a boot digging into his shoulder, and the stinging, searing pain of the arrow that pierced his chest. He recalled the movement of the general's hand as he gave the order to fire, and the face of the yellow-haired girl.

Link clenched his fists as he leaned against the stable wall. He slid to a squat, and crossed his arms over his knees, thinking. If Haema arrived and recognized him, the general might order his execution. If not, then perhaps he might survive for a little longer… Link closed his eyes. The best case scenario was that he was mistaken about the man's identity, and this Haema everyone spoke of was not the general who had ordered him shot.

He reached into his pocket and removed Merel's small pendant, looking it over briefly. It seemed useless and innocent in his hand, and he had kept it, despite its terrible performance, because it bore no marks that might inculpate him as a Sheikah spy. It did not have the iconic Eye, nor any other markings explicitly associated with the tribe. It seemed just a wooden triangle in his palm, etched with what looked like meaningless scribbles. He could've easily made it himself.

He wondered if Impa was thinking of him. He imagined her staring out a window in some hut somewhere in the vast desert, wondering if he was being whipped or burned by the King's interrogators for her location. She might've thought he'd abandoned her to return to the King's service. She might hate him for betraying her cause and getting himself captured on purpose.

Link was not sure himself if he had meant for things to end up this way or not. He remembered genuinely longing for Talporom's escape, the fear that wrapped around him with the length of the soldier's whip, the deep sense of regret gripping him when he pointed out the location of Ahnadib's camp. But he also remembered the pride at the King's praise, the joy at seeing the red warhorse once more, and the strange contentment that came over him when he resumed his work in the stables, as if nothing had ever happened.

The guilt of his betrayal washed over him in the span of half a breath. Suddenly, Link's heart shrank inside him, and he found himself clutching at his chest, massaging his muscles, as if he could squeeze out the self-condemnation.

How _dare_ he? After all Impa had done for him—after she had fished him from the moat and removed the arrow that otherwise would've killed him, after she took him to her village and gave him a home, after she led him to the spirits that gave him back his hearing, after she fed him, trained him, taught him, clothed him, sang to him… And he had the selfishness to consider returning to the life of the King's stableboy.

He balled the charm in his fist and hit his own forehead a few times, berating himself for his cowardice. A hot tear streamed from the corner of his eye, dripping down his cheek and falling to the sand between his tattered boots. He gripped the pendant so tightly he felt it compressing its shape into his palm, and held back a cry.

He couldn't do this. He couldn't behave this erratically, not when he was being watched. He shook his head vigorously, shutting his eyes tight against the tears. He slowed his breathing, loosening his fist, and lifted his head. He opened his hand, slowly, and removed the charm, placing it back in his pocket. It had left a distinct red triangle on the inside of his left palm, and he stared at it, both fascinated and repelled by its shape. He did not know why the resolutions came to him at that point—he later figured the charm was finally working.

 _The gods have given me the gift of hearing_ , he said to himself. _So I will listen. I will gather as much information as I can, and when I return to Impa, she will embrace me and tell me I've done well. I will show her I have not betrayed her._

So he listened. He eavesdropped on the stable master, eavesdropped on the soldiers, eavesdropped on the occasional officer who appeared at the stables to request a horse.

He gathered what he could about the situation in the region (and about the recent escape of the King's prisoners—apparently they remained free, probably safe behind the sturdy walls of Onrago), and learned that the Gerudo hadn't taken too kindly to the descendent of their deserter King coming back to reclaim the land. Some had celebrated his return, but many saw it as a prelude to forced annexation. Onrago had closed its gates to the King only because Ahnadib practically owned the city, but even some of their allies, the Gerudo who came to the camp to trade and deliver supplies, expressed some concern about the state of affairs. Link could not interpret what they said among themselves in their musical, guttural Gerudo, but when they came by to make deals or flirt with the soldiers, he could always make out snippets of conversation.

"Of _course_ Ahnadib isn't going to cooperate with you," one woman said to a stable hand. She was a driver in a caravan that delivered shipments of animal feed from Silk, and had a particular fondness for one of the black-haired stablemen. "She owns this place, and she's not looking for an investment partner. And your King comes here talking of unity—well, Ahnadib doesn't speak that language. She speaks with gold, and nothing else."

"Perhaps," the man said, glancing this way and that before slipping his hands around her waist, "she'll look on our great King's handsomeness and learn the language of love."

The Gerudo laughed, playing at removing his hands from her, but she did not push him away. She looked around. "Do we have time for some political negotiations?" she asked, seemingly to herself.

"Of course. Your caravan doesn't leave until midday."

"All right, but—we'll be heard."

The stablehand scanned his surroundings, and saw only Link, who seemed to be earnestly concentrating on cleaning the dirt from Epona's hooves. "Oh, don't mind him, he's deaf as a post. I'm s'posed to be watching him, but he ain't going nowhere."

"All right then, behind here?"

After they disappeared into the safety of the stable's shadows, their exchange took on a somewhat different tone. "You're not going to devour me, are you? I heard you Gerudo eat your men afterwards."

A short bout of quiet laughter. "Only if they underperform."

Their conversation devolved into protracted moans and hushed grunts. Link went back to cleaning Epona's hooves, knowing he'd gotten as much information as he possibly could. He shook his head and focused his full attention to his duties, ignoring the muffled sounds that came from behind the rickety stable wall.

* * *

When General Haema and his company arrived, with all the pomp of a military parade, Link leaned against a stable post, watching the procession. He kept an eye out for the general, and when he spied him astride his white horse, without his helmet, armor shining in the orange sun, Link's heart sank.

He didn't know why he allowed himself to entertain the notion that Haema might've been anyone else but the man who had given the order to fire on him and his yellow-haired friend. As the general rode past, he must've sensed Link's disappointment, since he turned his gaze briefly in the stable's direction. Link met the general's eyes, and watched them widen. Haema's mouth tightened, a slight rubicund hue spreading across his countenance, but he did not halt his march. The surprise at seeing a dead boy rise again passed over him, imperceptible to anyone but Link, and he resumed his steady ride toward the golden tent at the center of the bivouac.

Link was not surprised when the stable master came to him later that night, motioning for him to follow. He put down his small dinner and obeyed, lowering his eyes and perking up his ears. He followed Gorman down the rows of tents, past laughing soldiers gathered around fires, eating or drinking or playing dice. The stable master led him to an ornate tent near the center of the bivouac, black and squat, trimmed with gold. As they approached, Link heard muffled voices from between the slightly open flaps.

"My Lord, if he is who I think he is, it would only be prudent to kill him."

"Quell your excitement, Sir Haema," came the King's deep voice. "You are not thinking rationally."

"He is _evil_ , sire, he will undo you if given the opportunity."

"He certainly does not seem it. And what King would I be if I needlessly ordered the death of my loyal stablehand?"

"But he is _not_ loyal. My Lord, I am a historian, like my father, and his, all the way back to the conception of my house. The old stories run through me with my blood, and I have heard this story before. Kill him while you can."

The stable master approached the tent, nodding at one of the two guards at its entrance. He slipped past the flaps, informing the King of Gorman's arrival, and they were summoned inside.

Link, as usual, prostrated himself on the floor, while the stable master bowed deeply. "I have brought him, your majesty."

"Master Gorman," the King answered. "You may leave us to it."

Link saw the stable master's feet move, felt his presence disappear. He continued staring at the floor until a rough hand gripped the back of his collar and hauled him upright. He stared into the ruddy face of the general, his eyes piercing, his white eyebrows drawn together in what seemed to be both anger and surprise.

"It's him, sire. It's most definitely him." Haema let go of Link's shirt and he dropped a few inches back to the floor, where he stood still, eyes fixed at his feet. "Lord, please consider the fact he made his way to the fragment of the triforce. I do not know if he's been affected by it, but—"

"You said he and the insurrectionist's daughter went to the southeast tower, did you not?"

"Yes, sire—"

"Then if he is who you suspect he might be, he went to the wrong place. If it indeed led anyone to it, it would've been her."

Haema reddened even further. "Sire, I don't think—"

"She _is_ dead, is she not? You recovered her body?"

"Yes, sire."

"Then we've nothing to worry about from her. If her discovery of the southeastern tower was indeed marked by fate, just our luck that the last scion of the old royal family's blood was the daughter of an insurgent. This one, however…" The King stood, and approached Link. His heart thumped furiously, as if just being in proximity to such a powerful presence forced him to panic. The King gripped his shoulder, almost gently, and looked him over. "So where do you imagine he disappeared to for the winter? Was he hiding at the bottom of the moat?"

"I suspect the insurrectionists took him," Haema said. "Perhaps they've enticed him to their side."

"Now, what use would they have for a deaf boy?" He looked back at Link with a hint of amusement in his wide face. "I wonder if they tried to get information from you, but had to turn you loose after finding out you had no words to give." Mercifully, the King let go of Link, and turned back to Haema. "He gave me the location of Ahnadib's camp. He is taking quite good care of my mount. If you have doubts about him, we will keep him as a useful prisoner. So far he has behaved, but if you wish to satisfy your suspicious nature, my dear general, we will keep him close." The King again seated himself. "Tomorrow we march on Onrago. We will take the city, restock our supplies and continue west. You will have plenty of time to watch him, Sir Haema."

The King waved his hand at Link, shooing him. He took a deep, reverent bow and stepped toward the exit, slipping by the two guards, but taking his time walking away. He stopped within earshot of the tent, making a show of removing his boot and shaking a rock from it, lingering just long enough to catch the next vein of conversation.

"Sire, propriety dictates we must execute the boy and be done with it."

"If I kill him in this dark hour, he will no doubt emerge from some other shadow, some less accessible place in this wide kingdom. He will continue to be a thorn in my side, and in those of my children. No, Haema. the sheer amount of young men who think themselves chosen heroes is overwhelming. They're impossible to snuff out completely—they're like cockroaches. If indeed I have stumbled upon the one most likely to take up arms against me, a deaf-mute stableboy, no less, it is best if I keep him close. Close, happy, alive. If his loyalty still lies with me, then…"

Link could not tarry too long. He did not want anyone to suspect he could hear the deep voices of Haema and the King, so he made his way back to the stables. As he curled up under a thin blanket, he thought about their strange words, the way they spoke as if they were not sure of the yellow-haired girl's true lineage, their talk of insurgencies and ransoms, their baseless imaginings of him as some sort of hinderance.

They gave Link too much credit. If they thought of him highly enough to consider him a potential threat, they obviously knew something about him that he didn't.

* * *

Metal clanging, horses screaming, shouts of men and women as blade met blade—Link's ears flooded with a veritable cacophony. Of course, he merely stared ahead, expressionless, letting the clamor slide past him, insubstantial and thin as the dusty wind. The acrid smell of smoke and blood flooded his nose, and his eyesight blurred in the chaotic haze. He could not make out the details of the battle; the tiny black soldiers at the distant walls of the city seemed like streams of sand, quick and unpredictable.

But the King stared ahead at the battle with narrowed, knowledgeable eyes. He sat upon his red warhorse, fully armored in black and gold, speaking calmly to his generals, who came and went on his orders. The army seemed a well-oiled machine, each constituent performing its duty, and no more, before its leader came back to the King to receive more instructions.

Haema appeared and disappeared as frequently as the lowlier officers—he had his own regiment to maintain, after all. Link could see his white armor, his large, snowy horse above the rest, like a glint of a mirror on a field of dark ash. Haema towered above his own soldiers, above those who came rappelling down the stone walls of the city to meet him head-on. Gerudo arrows, shot from the battlements, glanced off his thick armor uselessly. Each time he returned to his King with news of the battle, or ready for a new command, he was always unharmed, and seemingly unsullied by the dust and smoke that colored the land a dark grey.

Even Link could not escape the grime that drifted from the desert battlefield below him. He stood at the King's side, one hand on Epona's flank, safe and far from the action. Link had not expected to be sent anywhere the horse did not go, but he couldn't help the relief from bubbling up in his stomach when he learned he was to stay behind the King while he gave his commands.

Link tried to understand both the words and intentions of the King while he issued his orders, but he could not pick apart the specific warriors' cant, he couldn't follow the veins of strategy to their feasible results. He only watched the seemingly inhuman multitude of soldiers swarm Onrago's walls, listened to their cries, smelled the smoke as arrows and trebuchets flung fire into the city.

The King's men rallied at the gates, wheeling a massive shaft of wood and metal suspended on crossbeams. Link wondered what use such a large, seemingly dull log might serve on a battlefield, but when the screaming soldiers swarmed behind it and swung it into the gates (Link tried to keep from starting at the booming sound), he saw the strong wood of the fortress splinter, the metal bend, and knew by beginner's instinct the city would fall shortly.

He did not know how long sieges normally lasted, but given the comments of the officers and commanders, spoken in quiet voices and intended to be in confidence, it looked as if it would be mercifully short. The soldiers had left camp at the break of dawn, surrounded Onrago in the late morning, and by the time the sun disappeared behind the distant, bare dunes entirely, when the chaos was illuminated only by the raging fires, the gates gave way, and the King's men flooded the city.

Haema returned with a smile on his face and not a smudge on his pristine armor, despite his poleax, hanging by his horse's flank, splattered with all sorts of material normally found inside a human being.

"An effortless victory," the general said, turning his snorting horse to face the rapidly dying battle. A few stragglers on the Gerudo side tried to hold the gate, but the King's men quickly overwhelmed them. Link could almost see the city gates flood with red.

The King turned Epona and nudged her down the shallow slope toward the battlefield. Link hurried behind, heart pounding, as they descended the hill to the smoking remains of the fight. The King wove his way past the corpses of both his own and enemy soldiers, past squealing, injured horses, past discarded weaponry, past ripped, soiled standards bearing his own sigil, swaying in the slight wind. Link tried not to look at any of these stark reminders of his own betrayal; he tried to close his nostrils to the sharp scents of fear and blood, he just kept one shaking hand on the flank of the horse, gripping the edges of her shining gold caparison when she trotted a little too fast for him to keep up. He momentarily cursed himself for teaching the animal to respond so well to her rider, and not just him personally. _That's the point of a well trained horse_ , he told himself, sighing. _She's not going to listen just to me._

The going was slow, and smelly. The sounds of battle died up ahead at the city gates, and by the time the King arrived, surrounded by battle-worn, noble generals and one nervous-looking stableboy, the city had calmed. The citizens, enemy, sympathetic or indifferent to the King, had laid down their arms, retreated into their homes, busied themselves with hauling the dead away for burial or the injured for treatment. Occasionally a stray Gerudo could be seen fighting off the King's men, apparently uninformed or simply uncaring of Onrago's defeat—these (usually) women were either cut down or subdued and dragged out of the monarch's noble sight.

The King's path to the inner city was straight and uninterrupted by the chaos of defeat around him. The joyful cries of his own soldiers, the weeping of the Gerudo fighters' children, the moans of the injured, the smell of smoke and the struggle to remove the bodies from his march did not seem to affect him. He just rode onward, through what appeared to be a once-lively market street, toward the large, ornate building standing at the town's center. Link had a feeling it might be the hub of government for the small city, and the King was about to make his glorious entrance to the chagrin of the current rulers.

"Lord." Haema's voice traveled down Link's spine like a shiver. "My men have returned no word of Ahnadib."

"Have them scour the city." Haema nodded and trotted off to relay orders, and the King, speaking seemingly only to himself, said, "You'd think after all her braggadocio, she would not prove such a coward." Link stayed silent, as expected. He tried to look around him for any recognizable bodies without the King noticing, but he could not spy any familiar faces, any streaks of white Sheikah hair amid the smoky disorder. It seemed that if his friends lay among the dead, they had not fallen in the King's path.

Link could not stop himself from thinking if only Palo were there, he might be able to shed some light on what the dead had seen. His stomach turned and he felt a little sick thinking of Palo and the others at such a time. His heart raced in his throat when he thought of how Impa or any of her family could be among the dead, draped over a battlement on the other end of the city, buried beneath other corpses, or among the fettered prisoners, marched off to wherever the King's army might keep them.

He tried not to betray his dismay, but the King did not seem to hold any interest in staring at his own servant. He merely looked around him, at the fires that engulfed the watchtowers, at the rapidly emptying streets, and the well-dressed, frightened individuals who poured from the city's central building, hands clasped in supplication. They had their own defeat etched on their dark faces, and pleas of mercy on their lips.

"Look well, stableboy," he said, as if Link could hear him. "This is how you win a city. This is how you win a war."


	26. The Wrath of General Haema

Hello friends! I know things have been quiet around here as far as updating goes; this has been the last term of my undergraduate career and I have been so absurdly busy y'all have no idea. But now that I've dressed up in a silly hat and robe to receive a paper for which I paid far too much, hopefully there will be more frequent updating in the future. So, onward, and as usual, thanks to all of you for reading!

* * *

"Many men will recall the battle between Mandrag Elgra and the Gorons as a long and arduous siege, but those in the front lines will tell you that the true battle only lasted a few minutes. Occupying those minutes was a hand-to-hand duel between Mandrag Elgra's esteemed son, Prince Ganondorf, and the Goron patriarch himself, Durmia. One soldier sums the affair up in a few charming but arguably misinformed words: 'They say you can't know what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, but it's clear now that the unstoppable force wins.'"

Samuel Red, _Recollections of Soldiers: An Examination of the Eldin War_

* * *

After the council of Onrago surrendered the city to the Great King of Hyrule, the wine began to flow. The man himself sat at the head of the table in the council chamber, flanked by his generals. Food and drink was called for, and, due to Haema's copious warnings about not letting the little traitor of a stableboy have free roam of the city, Link stood in the corner, watching Onrago's new lords celebrate their victory.

Every once in a while Haema would turn his large white head and shoot Link a threatening look. He knew better than to do anything but stand in silence, hands at his sides, stomach rumbling, as the councillors' cooks, now prisoners of war, brought out plates of spiced meat, sour soups, large jugs of wine and stronger spirits. The cooks themselves seemed contented only to be uncounted among the dead, but still, the King had one of his more magically-inclined generals wave a hand over the meal and declare it fit to eat before anyone dug in.

The sweet smell of the meats tortured Link, but he did not move, he did not beg. He merely stood straight, staring at the steaming bowls passed from hand to hand, at the glints of serving silver.

His situation did afford him a good look at the King's generals. Of course, there was Haema, who only rarely left his lord's side, but there were about a dozen others. Some bore the large armor and thick, scarred jaws of long-time military men, a few smelled of black magic, and a few were robed rather than armored, perhaps tacticians or magicians—Link had only spied a couple of them during the siege. A few were women, with the same red hair as their Gerudo cousins—perhaps a little lighter, diluted with the Hylian blood of the Capital. Most were fair, like Haema, but spanned a large age range.

The youngest seemed barely older than Link—a well-dressed man who appeared to be some sort of protégé to one of the older knights. Most seemed the King's age or older, a suspicion confirmed by their frivolous talk of battles past.

"This has been the fastest city I've seen fall my whole career—besides Leda, of course."

"Well, Eldin didn't really put up that much of a fight until the Gorons, did it?"

One thin man, with a thick black beard and slicked hair, laughed. "We can count ourselves lucky that Onrago was not occupied by the bastards—it would've taken months to fall and we'd have had no one left alive to cook for us."

"Tenacious things, weren't they?"

Link bit his lip, deadening his face, hoping the trajectory of the conversation would not disturb him into making any facial expressions indicative of his ability to hear.

"And so _strange_. Do you remember your first kill of the battle?" one older soldier asked another.

"I do. I remember cutting one in the side, thinking it would be like hitting a rock with my blade—but gods dammit, was I surprised to see blood come out!"

"Hard on the outside, soft on the inside, as the saying goes."

"Just like my old lady bakes pastries."

A peal of laughter burst around the table. Link swallowed. He crossed his hands behind his back and squeezed his fingers tightly. He dug his nails into his own skin, letting the pain distract him from the conversation.

"You ever crushed one under a war hammer? Such a satisfying sound."

"Of course." Haema was the first to answer, face reddened with wine. "I lost my poleax and horse on the scree the first night—gods, that was a hell of a battle—picked up one of their own hammers. I found out then how a Goron kills another Goron; bring one of those down on their heads and—" the general smashed the table with a fist—"the rock splits right open. It certainly caught me off guard—rocks, having brains."

"If you can call 'em brains," a woman said, and another bout of laughter lit up the hall. The King just crossed his arms at the head of the table and eyed his generals, something of a sardonic look on his face. His eyes lifted, glancing past his peers, and settled on the far wall. Link had to look to the floor, and swallowed audibly. He squeezed his fists tighter behind his back, telling his stomach to settle, telling himself to ignore the conversation around him. When he lifted his eyes again, the King had returned to listening to his compatriots recall the glorious days of the Eldin War.

"It's a damn good thing they split open at all," the thin, black-bearded man put in, "or else we'd have lost not only the battle, but some fine resources."

"What do you mean?" the youngest man asked.

"I mean a Goron's intestines make for some of the toughest material around. Half the pulleys in the Capital's factories are wound 'round with some sort of their sinew or another. You fold in that flesh with any rope and it'll last for decades."

Link's stomach spasmed. He closed his eyes and grit his teeth.

"I have saddlebags made of their stomachs. Lasted me since the end of the War. Not a scratch on 'em."

"Perfect material really—tissue's easy to cut when wet and alive, once you boil them, they're tough as steel. You've gotta have some sturdy insides to digest rocks, after all. "

"It's only a pity the lot of 'em were too stubborn for us to let them live. Imagine if we had a constant source of such substance—not to mention the mining power."

"Why," one red-faced, obviously drunk woman said, "we'd rule the world by now!"

Many of the generals seemed to find this quip particularly amusing. Raucous laughter erupted from more than one. Link noticed, with a shiver, the King did not crack a smile. Apparently some of the others noticed as well, since the guffaws died down after a few seconds.

"I simply have to say I regret their stubbornness," the King said, after the table fell silent.

"Sire," Haema started, seemingly a little soberer than he'd been mere minutes previously. "With all my humble respect, it is not your regret to bear. It is their fault for resisting as they did. There was no point in it, especially after Durmia fell—"

"Then he should've come to me sooner. If the fate of an entire race could be sealed by one duel, I would've rather gotten it over with quickly."

Sobriety seemed to grip the table, instantly and irrevocably. The King lifted his eyes to Link, who had to bite the inside of his lip to keep from scowling. Haema followed his King's gaze. "What are you grimacing at, boy?" he growled. "You _eavesdropping_ over there?"

With what may have been impetuosity, or a strong desire to change the subject, Haema burst from his chair toward Link, hand outstretched. Link told his arms to stay at his side, even when the general's white-gloved fingers wrapped around his throat and lifted him slightly from the tiled floor. Fear gripped Link harder than Haema himself, and he gasped for air as the man looked into his face, cheeks red with ire and wine. "I _asked_ you what you were _grimacing at_."

Link's eyes widened, and for a moment he was sure Haema had solved the mystery of the deaf boy back from the dead. For a terrible second, he was sure the general knew about his involvement with the Sheikah, about his raid on the King's camp, about his ability to hear.

Then, like a wave of relief, his stomach growled so loudly it practically echoed across the chamber. Link stilled, eyes locked with Haema's. A few unendurable fractions of a second passed, and then the King laughed.

As if following commands, the rest of the generals chortled with him, torturously cautious. When his laughter died down, so did theirs, nearly instantaneously and without the slightest hint of mirth.

"He's watching us eat on an empty stomach, Sir Haema," the King said, "because you wanted to keep an eye on him so badly. So if you dislike his pained looks, perhaps you should feed him. Dish him out a portion and serve it to him."

Haema whipped his head around, eyes wide. A look of indignant fury passed over his face, and his cheeks darkened from red to a fleshy purple. As if instinctively, he squeezed Link's throat tighter before finally releasing him, muscles in his jaw flexing, distorting the scars and scraggly light beard that had started to grow there.

But Haema did not argue. He stomped back to the table, gripped a small bowl and slopped some reddish stew into it. He wasn't halfway back to Link before the rest of the table burst into terrible laughter.

The rage never left Haema's face, even when he stormed back to Link and thrust the bowl toward him so hard some of the scalding broth spilled across his shirt. Link merely took the bowl, bowing deeply, trying to keep his rushing heart from pounding right out of his chest. The look Haema gave him was one step short of murder, and as the general turned from him, he was half sure the next time Haema saw him, he'd have that war hammer raised high, coming down to crack Link's head open like a helpless Goron's.

* * *

The remains of the battle, mostly the bodies of Onrago's soldiers, were piled up outside the city and burned. Link leaned on the stable fences by the city entrance, Epona snorting behind him, and watched the conquered citizens of the city carry their own dead—and the King's—outside to the brown, rocky sands beyond the splintered gates. The only familiar face Link saw among the fallen was the twisted, wrinkled and sunken countenance of the Sheikah woman who had led their raid on the King's camp. Her skin was paler than a Hylian's, and a brown gash across her throat told him how she'd died.

Again, he found himself wishing Palo were with him, if only to relay his apologies to the woman. He would tell her he was sorry for his traitorous thoughts, and that he would make up for it by returning to the Sheikah a stronger man, a man with knowledge of the King's camps and strategies. He would find Impa and tell her all he knew—if she was still alive.

He had not seen her body exit the city gates with the rest, but a terrible voice inside him told him he'd simply missed it—that she'd been carried out when his back was turned, that she was already burnt, that she had been fed to the King's hounds, that even if she'd escaped the city, she was dying out in the desert, drawing her last waterless breath.

According to what he'd overheard, Ahnadib and a small faction of her warriors had snuck out of the city before it fell. He comforted himself with the thought that his friends might have been among those warriors to escape, and they were all riding west, deeper into Gerudo territory.

But that only meant the King would have to chase them. If the desert would not give up its cities because of the influence of the middle-aged matriarch, then the King would have little choice but to dispose of her. And so it wasn't more than a few days after entering Onrago that preparations for leaving were made.

The King left Link under the watchful eye of Gorman. Generally, he was left in peace to care for Epona and get her ready for the long ride across the harsh desert, except for the occasional visit and subsequent threat from Haema. If he happened to run across Link in the course of his duties, he would always take a minute or two out of his day to mistreat him.

The mildest threats were nothing more than a look of disdain here and there, or a wide scowl. The worst was when Link would accidentally find himself within arm's reach of the general, in which case he'd often be jostled, struck or prodded, or have to endure a short lecture he pretended not to understand.

"You may not hear me you little bastard, so read my lips: if you so much as look as if you'll step out of line, I'll have one of my archers put a bolt through you. Again."

"You're lucky his majesty won't let me kill you. But he'll come around eventually."

"You'd better watch your back, you little shit. You won't be able to hear me when I come up to slit your throat."

Gorman did not seem to understand why the general had it out for Link; the embarrassing debacle in the council chamber seemed to be a secret shared only among the generals, who privately laughed at Haema from behind armored hands, over fine wines taken from the cellars of the city. As far as the regular citizenry was concerned, Haema was still chock full of indignant honor, and it seemed strange to them to have him pick out a certain peasant to harass when there were so many to choose from, and so available. But none could confront a man like that, much less a man of such high rank.

Still, when Haema was not in the near vicinity, threatening him, Link listened. When he was sure he would go unnoticed standing in the corners of this and that square, ears perked, when the eyes of the King's bodyguards and generals were not on him, he gathered what he could.

They were to leave Onrago the following week. The city itself was to be left under the care of one of the King's generals, a native Gerudo woman who knew the language and culture. What she would _do_ with the city, once hers, seemed to be the topic of some speculation.

A stablehand mentioned he thought she would keep it running for as long as the King needed it as a base of operations. As soon as he found his way to the metropolis of Obra Garud and took it over, she'd burn it to the ground. Another said the King would burn both cities, after he'd reconquered his homeland.

One soldier said he was very sure Onrago's new ruler was going to replace Ahnadib as the region's womsilk monopolist, securing a constant and ample supply to the Capital.

"The King's brought engineers with him," the soldier said. "They're gonna build another bridge across the Gerudo River Valley."

"What for? Aren't there already more than one?"

"He needs one wide enough for his engines. They're gonna take the wormsilk to the Capital faster than you can ride there with any horse."

The others laughed at him. "How do you know?"

"My uncle is in the engineering corps; he told me."

Link was unsure what to make of this information but he stored it away anyway, piling it on top of the other lists and stories he'd maintained in his mind for the purpose of relaying to Impa later. Though, he had to admit to himself he had little idea of when _later_ actually was, or if he would live long enough to see it arrive.

* * *

When the King's men prepared themselves to leave the taken city, when their ears and eyes were turned away from Link, he would lean up into Epona's ear and whisper secrets to her.

Of course, he used no words. But he let loose a tiny, thin, high whistle from between his teeth into her sensitive ear. At the same time he would express his distress to her, clenching his muscles and adopting a look of pain. She usually blinked at him soundlessly, as horses are wont to do, but after a few hours (quiet, erratic, punctuated hours), she seemed to understand the sound meant he was in some sort of distress.

He could not tell her outright that sometime in the future, maybe near, maybe far, he planned to take up her reins, throw himself on her back and gallop out of the camp, never to return. He would make his way out in the dead of night, with his loyal mount and his mind full of information. He would ride Epona back to Impa, and she would be quite impressed with them both.

 _You come to me when I whistle like this_ , he told her, in no words but with faint sounds, looks and gestures. _I am in trouble. You will come to me._

It took dozens of reiterations of the sentiment, but Epona seemed smarter and more tuned to the quirks of his human nature than other horses—even some of the hounds. He knew he could count on her when the time came to make his escape.

But with Haema breathing down his neck, and with little information but what he could muster from the gossiping stablehands, Link knew his return to the Sheikah would remain well over the horizon of the future. The best he could hope for was the opportunity to listen closely to the King or his other generals.

Strangely enough, it was Haema's implacable disdain for him that made him a common sight in the King's shadow. When they made ready to leave the broken and silent city, left under the care of a royalist Gerudo, Link managed to secure himself a place behind the King, mounted on a small brown horse taken from Onrago's stables. His horse was old, shy, and much too weak for battle or escape. Both he and his mount were woefully undecorated, lest anyone think the young man following so closely in the King's footsteps was his squire. He seemed nothing more than a beggar granted clemency and allowed to step within the bounds of the King's glorious presence, a recipient of the monarch's infinite charity. He supposed, to an extent, it was true.

They rode through the desert slowly. Carts' wheels sank into the white sand uselessly, so the camp had swapped out many of its mules and horses for large camels and dromedaries, backs piled high with supplies. Only the King and his generals were allowed to retain their horses—most of the equestrian knights found themselves on equal footing with their lowlier counterparts, but as they were noblemen trained in both forms of combat, they were no less useful for the King's purposes.

The landscape itself was harsh and unyielding. As they marched away from Onrago and the shadows of the bare mountains, the sand turned from rocky red to smooth, shining white, thin as liquid. A sour wind occasionally screamed across the dunes, flinging small particles over the soldiers and their supplies. By the time they made camp the first night, the company was overflowing with complaints of the sand's ubiquitous invasion of every possession.

"I just _can't_ get it out from between my toes."

"It's so bothersome, in your clothes."

"Or your hair."

"Or your bedding. Gods damned, my skin will never feel clean again."

Even the food started tasting something like sand. Though Link was granted the privilege of dining within the generals' large tent, on food vastly more palatable than those of the soldiers', he could not ignore the bitter, gritty taste that permeated every bite. Some of the generals and officers eschewed food in favor of alcohol, but they soon learned that the habit was not conducive to comfort in the early mornings, when the camp packed up and moved on, deeper in to the desert.

Link could appreciate the stillness of the sands. When the howling wind died down at night, a heavy silence lay over the camp; it seemed even the crackling of fires and the idle conversation of soldiers quieted under the oppressive dark. Perhaps the company was too tired to speak, perhaps it was the strange, almost thaumaturgical power of that vast, empty place that kept the words inside.

Either way, most of Link's time was spent in the presence of quietness—even the King's finest seemed to show disinterest in discussing the violent, glorious days of wars past. While he enjoyed the silence more than anyone, he still could not help feeling cheated that only after he had been granted closeness to the King and his generals, they suddenly became taciturn.

A reprieve from his frustrations came in the form of the King himself, no more than a large shadow at the entrance to the generals' tent. While the officers slept soundly, large beds unfolded against the thick tarp walls, lined up in the barrack much in the fashion of the lowlier soldiers, the King stood alone in the doorway, silhouetted against the bright red moon of the desert.

Link had been granted the privilege of sleeping on the floor by the entrance of the officers' tent, a position well within the sightline of the soldiers who guarded their superiors in the night. Haema had insisted, and the King, reasonable as ever, acquiesced his general's impassioned pleas. Link did not mind; while he was not allowed to rest with the animals, the army did provide him with a soft sleeping mat, a few worn blankets and a steady supply of fresh meals.

The King himself slept alone in his private tent, rather than among his officers, but he could often be spied walking purposefully around camp in the dead of night as if he had his own scouting to do. No one was sure if he did it merely for his own satisfaction, or to assuage some apprehension or another, but no one dared to ask. One does not question a man like that.

So when Link sat up to see the broad shadow of the King blot out the entrance to the officers' temporary abode, he was not entirely surprised. The man clasped his hands behind him, staring out into the distance, as if he wished to catch a glimpse of something best seen from this particular spot in camp. It seemed he had no desire to enter the tent nor waken his officers.

Link shuffled slightly in his blankets, almost soundlessly. When the King, still within full view of the open flap, turned to look at the source of the noise, Link tried to shrink himself, to look inconspicuous against the backdrop of darkness and light snoring. But the King had already seen he was awake and watching.

So when the man turned slightly, lifting his hand in a rising motion, Link had no choice but to pull himself out of his thin blankets, barefoot, and, bowing his head in deference, obey the summon. Link exited the officers' tent and took a knee, making to press his forehead against the moonlit sand, but the King stopped him.

He beckoned him, turning away from the tent, and the encampment entirely, and stepping toward the night. Link had no choice but to follow him, keeping his head down. The King strode forward, with purpose, as if he had some business outside of camp, his wide silhouette passing over the setting moon. Soldiers knelt as he walked by, mouthing their required respects, and he ignored them. He just led Link away from the bivouac, out toward the reddish, moonlit desert.

Link was quite sure the King was leading him away from the camp as one might lead an animal away from its stables before putting it down. But when the monarch stopped, planting his feet on the crest of a dune a few hundred feet away from camp, he did not turn and cut his stableboy down. He just stared into the moonlight, and took a deep breath.

"You can sense it, can't you?" The King's voice rumbled deeply, absurdly loud in the silent dark of the vast desert.

Link did not know what he was supposed to be sensing, but if it was a deep discomfort at being alone, at the King's mercy, in the middle of a vast foreign land with no allies, then yes, he could certainly sense it.

"Surely a boy like you should be able to feel it. It's everywhere here, in the sand, the sky…"

Link thought perhaps if he was still deaf, he might be able to acknowledge what the King spoke of, but all he could see and smell were the endless sands, and the lifeless quiet of the night. A harsh breeze passed over the dunes, ruffling the King's dark cloak, and he almost smiled.

"There it is again. That wind."

Link had to admit it did send a fearful shiver through him, though he didn't quite know why.

"I've walked across the sands of my ancestors many times before, and I cannot get used to it," the King said, amused at something Link could not see. "It seems too much time in Hyrule has dampened the desert blood in me." He stood silent a while, just staring into the distance. He did not seem to care if Link heard him or not. "I never wanted to come back here. I never wanted to conquer this dry, desolate place. The whole reason my ancestors came over to Hyrule in the first place was because the winds here brought nothing but death. And now look at me."

A sudden, harsh gale struck up sand and threw it off the crest of the dune, glittering in the stark moonlight. The King let out a subtle, mirthless laugh. "Ah, the desert has heard me speak ill of her. She is testy as ever." He turned his back to the moon, and stepped toward the camp. "She has a magic that even her own people fear. But I vow I will not."

Link followed him as he walked back to the bivouac, occasionally turning his head to glance at the moon watching them, round and red.

The King walked quietly for a while. The shapes of the tents cleared in the moonlight as they approached the camp. "I enjoyed this little sortie. I speak easy with you, I suppose because you cannot listen. It is like talking to a hound, but all the devils forbid my subjects see me hold conversation with an animal. No, I suppose you will do for now. Besides, my advisors insist I keep a close eye on you."

The King again seemed to laugh at nothing, and another sandy gale forced harsh shivers down Link's spine. He was almost relieved to get back to the safety of the bivouac.


	27. The King Speaks

"Even though he won't admit it, every Hylian man, at one time or another, has harbored perverse fantasies about being kidnapped and violated by the so-called 'Gerudo Horde.' Of course, there is no such thing, and I have found that despite their reputation for sexual aggression, the Gerudo were nothing but friendly toward me. A bit vulgar, perhaps even forward, but there was no kidnapping, no male harems, no trade in men as chattel. I was not drained of my seed and promptly beheaded, as my cousins used to warn me. I was, however, the butt-end of many a profane, somewhat demeaning jest regarding my 'ancillary organ.' My guide assured me that insults and jokes are a sign of affection among Gerudo—not so different from many of my own foul-mouthed acquaintances. During my stay at Obra Garud, I did not so much as live out a fraction of my adolescent fantasies, but I did make quite a few lifelong friends."

T. L. Malona, _Life and Travels of a Wayward Bard_

* * *

There were two things in the desert the King's men feared most: the sandworms, and the women. Link heard many a conversation illustrating both species' habits of devouring men whole, of placing curses upon them in the night.

According to all reliable geographical sources: Gerudo royalist guides, generals who had visited the area before, and one particularly outspoken military cartographer who had planned the army's march from the Capital all the way to Obra Garud, they had nothing to fear from the worms. It was apparently the other source of the soldiers' apprehension that posed any threat.

For at every hamlet at the shore of a nameless oasis, at every rickety waypoint, every trading post along the journey, resistance primarily came in a female form. Village matriarchs would refuse to accommodate the King's men, young women would attempt to seduce and rob the male soldiers, girls who were barely old enough to walk could be found surreptitiously enjoying the company's dwindling supplies of food. Female (and some male) soldiers reported that they were given offers to join the enemy in exchange for clemency from the wrathful goddesses of the desert. As far as Link knew, all refused. He had not known if it was because of their staunch loyalty, or because they feared the anger of their own King more than that of the ancient deities of the sand.

Sometimes they were met with outright violence. More than one village formed a small militia group when told of the company's approach, but, quite understandably, the Hyrulean King's vast army outmatched them. Insurgents were executed promptly, prisoners captured and released, and each village they passed through was more or less left in the same state in which it had been found—perhaps with fewer outspoken or aggressive leaders and maybe bereft of some food.

They moved through the desert virtually unimpeded. Word was that Ahnadib and what remained of her soldiers had met the Territories' real army in Obra Garud, and planned to stage a final stand on the sands in front of that great city. No one was surprised to hear this news; the little hamlets and oases that resided between the cities of Onrago and Obra Garud were essentially without worth—the real fighting would have to be done over the wormsilk capital of the world, where the true wealth lay.

Slowly, steadily, the King's army made its way toward that metropolis. Link found himself too busy to count the days; he found himself so wrapped up in caring for the King's animals, he barely had time to feed himself, much less wonder how long he'd been with the company, acting as a useful prisoner, as the King put it.

Even in the quiet hours, when the moon would normally coax Link's thoughts from his head and he could sort through them at will, he found himself occupied with other, more important matters. Every few nights, the King would come to him, bid him rise from his bed and accompany him on some short outing or another into the desert. Link did not know what these expeditions were for—apparently they satisfied the King in some personal way.

Sometimes it seemed that the monarch simply wished to escape the bustle of the camp. Sometimes he was silent the entire walk, sometimes he did nothing but hum to himself while he stared up at the desert moon, sometimes he spoke in a language Link did not understand, but could guess was Gerudo or another such dialect. When they were about halfway to Obra Garud (or so Link had overheard from a potentially misinformed archer), the King confounded him with a confession.

"I detest the smell of that camp." The way the King looked at him as he said it seemed as if he could guess Link agreed with him.

He was entirely correct. The bivouac was a harsh place, full of sweaty men and animals, full of smoke and blood. Water was scarce, so bathing was a privilege reserved for the higher ranks. Link knew he smelled terrible, but he couldn't exactly make his way up to a convenient hot spring, or take water from Irma's fire and sponge himself off when he needed his privacy, as he could in Kakariko.

"It reeks of humanity." Link did not know what the King meant. "Of men and disease, of fighting and gambling and drink and all manner of untoward proclivities." The King turned his eye on Link, glinting gold in the moonlight. "It is well known I often concern myself with more otherworldly things. And Sir Haema suspects you do, too."

Link did not have to feign the confusion on his face. He just hoped it was the sort of confusion of a deaf boy trying to make out the lip movements of a conversation partner, rather than someone who was attempting to extract meaning from words he could actually hear. He did not know if there was much of a difference between those two faces.

The King stopped walking, and took a long breath, as if thinking deeply. Link saw the muscles in his jaw flex under his red beard, and spied a few veins in his neck pulsate with effort. "Do you know why I'm doing this? Why I have returned to this desolate place, the place my ancestors rightly left behind? It is all for unity. For peace. If I leave the provinces as they are, skirmishes about autonomy and independence will rage for centuries to come. I have to repair this fractured land at any cost. I need to make sure Hyrulean does not fight Hyrulean, brothers do not fight brothers, as they have done in our terrible history of civil war. Well before my great grandfather came to your land, well before the Schism and Eldin wars, the provinces squabbled like petty children. Hundreds of thousands died, and even more suffered, all over this."

The King lifted a fist between Link's face and his own. A sharp, discomfiting light shone from between his tightly clenched fingers, and his face contorted with effort. He slowly opened his hand, thick fingers flexed like a claw, as if restraining what appeared above his dark palm.

A small, infinitely bright light floated innocuously above his fingertips, pulsating slightly. It had no substance, it had no real form—it was more of the idea of a triangle than the shape itself, but the strange little thing forced Link to take a step back. He suddenly filled up with the same inexplicable dread he felt when he and the yellow-haired girl had come upon the mysterious light in the southeast tower of the palace. Deep in his gut, he knew this was the golden power Impa and the others had talked about, he knew this was the girl's birthright, he knew that although the light, whatever it was, seemed to take a different, smaller form, it was still the same entity. Link stared down at the King's open hand, marveling at the power he held within it, so small, yet bursting with such energy Link could not look at it without squinting. Something a little stranger than physical pain ran through him, and he gulped loudly.

Fortunately, the King closed his fist and the light disappeared. Link sighed, a bead of sweat dropping from the tip of his nose to the collar of his ratty shirt, but he did not have time to take a breath and relax.

Without warning, the King grabbed Link's wrist. He surprised himself with the volume of his quick intake of breath, but he did not cry out as the King twisted it up toward the moonlight. He seemed interested in the contents of the back of his hand, turning it so he could better see it in the dim light. A sharp pain coursed through Link's arm into his shoulder, but he did not know if that was because the King's strong hand twisted his muscles, or the residual energy from that strange light pained him. But Link hid his discomfort, stilling his face and taking a deep breath as the King looked over his hand in a most interested manner.

"Hm. Nothing," he muttered. "It's hard to tell at the moment, isn't it… Perhaps you have some potential, but you are nothing more than a lowly stableboy." The King's painful grip on his wrist loosened. "You are no threat to me."

Much to Link's relief, the man released his hand. He let it fall, resisting the urge to rub some of the residual pain from his burning wrist. The King turned from him, again staring at the setting moon. Half of its red face had been eaten away by punctual, monthly darkness, and by its partial light Link could see the King's sullen smile.

"Some of us are born worthy of power," he said. "Some, like you, must earn it. That's hardly fair, is it not? Life never is. The strong must cut their way to the top, even if they are not born there. I was lucky enough to be born where I belong. My great grandfather was not. Hence the Conquering War." He turned to eye Link with his uncanny yellow irises. "I suspect you are not the kind of man who can cut your way upward." Link lowered his gaze, as if to prove the King's point. He smiled and turned back to the camp, waving one arm. "But you know what they say about a broken blade."

 _It may yet draw blood_ , Link answered in his head, echoing the words of the great spirit at the peak of Eldin. He wondered if it was a common phrase, or if the King had somehow extracted it from Link's guarded mind with his intense stare. He shivered, wrapping his thin cloak tighter around him, and trotted after the King, holding his head low.

* * *

"There it is, sire," Haema told the King, handing him a silver spyglass. "Obra Garud."

The King raised it to his eye and looked at the smear of gray that dotted the horizon, past the white dunes shining in the sun. He stared through the glass for a few seconds before he smiled cynically. "It looks like our sisters on the outer walls have noticed us."

"Have they?"

"You can tell by the obscene gestures they're sending our way."

Haema, as expected, turned a bright shade of angry red. "My lord, if you wish, I will personally behead those individuals."

"My dear general, it is common knowledge that the Gerudo greet both friends and enemies this way. It is merely a cultural salute." The King laughed slightly. "It looks as if one has decided to present us with her buttocks."

Haema reddened even further, and Link could feel the spread of that fluster threaten to color his own cheeks. He swallowed, telling himself to un-hear what he'd overheard. "Sire," the general said. "I cannot stand idly by while they show such blatant signs of disrespect—"

The King lowered the spyglass. "Patience, Sir Haema. They will have plenty of time to regret their incivility in the future."

"Yes, your majesty." The general lowered his head.

"In the meantime, send a herald to Ahnadib. She will want to look over our ultimatum before she condemns all her soldiers to die by our hands."

"Yes, sire."

"And give him a banner. They might not let him past the gates otherwise." The King turned Epona, nudging her into a trot, away from the massive city, its high, dark stone walls, and the frivolous women who danced on its battlements. Link followed him, leaving Haema to fume at the crest of the white dune.

The King trotted to the center of the bivouac, and dismounted by his tent. He handed Epona's reins to Link and motioned for the him to lead the horse away and tie her safely, as he usually did. He obeyed, and finding himself alone with her, took a fraction of a minute to lean up into her ear and whistle. The sound, barely audible to anyone but a horse, made her twitch, and she snorted in understanding. She seemed to be insulted by Link's repetition; the suggestion that she needed to be told again and again that he wanted her to come when he called seemed to offend her. He knew she was a smart creature, and he only took the extra precaution because for some time, unnoticeably to anyone but him and the horse, he had lost some of that deep, silent language he shared with her. He did not know if it was simply because he'd spent so long away from her, but sometimes, when he found himself misunderstanding her, she would stomp and quiver in disappointment.

A few faux pas here and there were of no concern when it came to interspecies communication, Link knew, and as far as anyone could tell, he was his same old mysterious, deaf self. He just knew that when it came time to orchestrate his escape, he couldn't afford one wrong note.

Haema's arrival cut his moment with Epona short. The general, as was custom, gave him a violent sneer as he passed, and Link lowered his head, tying Epona to a hastily hammered post and removing her saddle. He cleaned and brushed her as the camp settled down. Tents cropped up around him, dim yellow light of fires reflecting off their white sides, and the harsh sun crept low in the west, over the distant city. When he finished tending to Epona, he obeyed the roar of his empty stomach and made his way to the officers' mess, a long, grayish tent where he was allowed to take his share of food the colonels and lieutenants did not finish.

Inside the tent, he found a few officers still lingering at the far end. Link eyed them, hoping to remain inconspicuous as he gathered a few scoops of cold rice and some dry curry. He piled them into his dirty bowl and sat down to eat in silence, catching a few words here and there from the animated men and women.

"So… that's how it went."

"Of _course_ that's how it went. This is _Ahnadib_ we're speaking of. She's not going to just roll over and give up her wealth of silk. That's not how she runs her business. At least she sent our herald back alive. Gerudo have been known to send the heads of men back via catapult, with their messages crumpled in their mouths."

"I saw him when he got back here and he was very much alive. He said that there weren't only Gerudo soldiers with Ahnadib when he delivered the ultimatum to her."

"Oh, so she's got some of our own with her? Hylians?"

"No. Sheikah."

Link's ears perked up and he went still. He clenched his jaw, the dry powder burning his tongue, and swallowed loudly. One of the officers turned to eye him over her shoulder, and seeing their eavesdropper was nothing more than the King's deaf stablehand, went back to speaking.

"You think it could be the same insurgents who broke into the palace last autumn?"

"No, they killed them, remember? Threw their bodies in the moat."

"Ha, I didn't expect there to be so many auxiliary Sheikah. Goddess knows there aren't many of 'em left."

"Not after Queen Elgra was done with 'em."

"And the Ordishmen before her. Devils below, it's like the whole world wants them dead. Not that I can blame it."

The officers made their way to the tent's entrance and out into the night, taking their bitter laughter with them.

Link set down his empty bowl and wiped it off with his sleeve. He put it under his arm and stood, taking a deep breath and sauntering out of the mess. He turned toward the officer's tent, head low, thinking deeply.

From what he could glean from the excited lieutenants' conversation, it seemed Ahnadib had several Sheikah around her. Link could not know how many, but his most optimistic guess would be four, plus whatever members of the tribe they'd sprung from the King's camp—the only Sheikah corpse he'd seen in Onrago had been that of the older woman who had led the raid to liberate the prisoners. He was aware of the discouraging possibility that he'd simply not seen the others' bodies before they'd been dragged out of the city gates and burned, but he knew in his heart Impa would be among the living. He was sure that if she weren't, he would've felt it, somehow. He wasn't nearly as keen to the sort of insensible undercurrents of perception as he'd been when he was still deaf, but whatever vestigial hypersensitivity he'd retained told him not to lose hope.

Impa was alive. Talm was alive. Even Palo, who hovered so near to death he could see right into it, still drew breath. He knew it.

He was as close to them as he could get, before the inevitable battle started. If he wanted to warn them of the King's numbers, his strategies and how many soldiers and of what type would assault the city, he'd have to get to them before the King made his move. And if it was true that Ahnadib had already sent back their herald with a rejection of their terms of surrender, he didn't have much time.

It would have to be tonight. Sometime in the darkest hours, he would have to make his way to Epona and they would have to ride to the edge of camp and out into the desert before anyone noticed. They would have to make it to the city without being followed or shot down, and then he'd have to convince whoever guarded the gate to let him in…

Goddesses above, he had one hell of a night ahead of him. But, hand instinctively wandering to his breast pocket and removing the charm of courage Merel gifted him, he vowed that he wouldn't falter. Now might be the only chance he had to get back to his allies, and although he knew he did not have as much information on the King and his strategies as he would've liked, he might have enough. Maybe if he told Impa all he knew, she would be able to glean some useful information out of the conversations he had stored in his frantic mind.

He stopped at the officers' tent, and took his usual place by the entrance. He unfurled his small bedroll and sat on it, dropping his bowl beside him and staring at his crossed legs. It was still fairly early in the night, and he would have to wait until the rest of the camp fell into a deep sleep before he could sneak out of the tent and make his way to Epona.

Then there was the problem of the King. He had left Link alone these past few nights, instead preferring to busy himself with other, more pressing matters than taking his servant out for a walk. It was unlikely that the King would show himself at the tent flap, but if he did, Link would have to endure a hike and a lecture before he could make his daring escape.

So he waited. The officers filed in one by one and took to bed, their ugly snores filling the barracks and drifting out into the mercifully empty doorway. The sounds of camp died down, the fires snuffed out, and the King did not appear. Link waited until well past the usual time for his arrival, and when he did not show his face, he slowly pulled the sheets off him. He pushed himself to his feet, taking care not to wake the others, and snuck to the tent flap.

Outside was one disinterested, drowsy-looking guard. Link tapped him on the shoulder, and he seemed to snap awake, looking over at him with disdain. Link motioned that he had to relieve himself, and the guard gave him quick, uncaring permission before sinking back into his stupor. Link did not have time to marvel at how the guard managed to sleep standing up, and he stepped toward where the sanitary engineers had built a temporary privy. He passed a few incurious guards on his way, but before he arrived, he took a sharp right and slipped into the shadows.

He tried to remember what Impa taught him about how to slink through the dark undetected. He slowed his breathing, kept his eyes peeled for any signs of movement, and quickly slipped behind the nearest tents. When he was safely concealed in the darkness, he dropped to his knee, looking around him for any spying eyes, and whistled softly. It was a high, almost imperceptible whine, meticulously pushed through his teeth and lips. A few soldiers here and there might be able to hear a slight, brief, annoying sound, but it was unlikely that any would wake themselves to investigate. Link could hear Epona's hooves a few tents over, stomping in anticipation. She had heard him. She was awake, and she would be ready.

He knew he didn't have time to prepare her properly. He would have to grab her mane, swing himself up on her bare back and ride as fast and quietly as he could to the edge of camp and beyond. He inhaled deeply, rethinking his whole plan, breath quivering in his throat, but remembered his vow not to waver. He almost felt the small charm warm against his chest in his pocket, and snuck out from behind the tents, toward the post where Epona waited.

She turned to him and snorted when he approached. He raised a hand, quieting her, and crept up to her side. He quickly scanned his immediate surroundings before giving her a reassuring pat on the cheek. He lay his hands on her harness, and with a deep breath, gathered his courage. He slipped his trembling fingers around the knot that held her to her post and loosened it.

He froze, heart pounding somewhere near his throat. A slight shifting of sand, the swish of a cloak—Link was not alone. His breath left him, but he told himself he could not turn around, he could not hear the soft footsteps approach him. He knew who stood behind him, watching him fiddle with the horse's halter, but he could not look. Slowly, he retightened the rope, his hand naturally moving to Epona's cheek, and he started to stroke her. She blinked at him in confusion—his rigidity, the way his heart clanged against his ribcage like a drum, his warning whistle—all had told her he was up to something. She had fully expected excitement, and when Link did nothing but readjust her halter and give her a comforting pat on the face, she snorted almost derisively.

He was not particularly inclined to interpret her movements and sounds, not while the King stood and watched him. He could feel those intense eyes on his back, but he could not force himself to turn around. For what couldn't have been longer than a minute or two, but what seemed like hours, the King stared at him. He tried his best to interact naturally with Epona, stroking her favorite spots, making sure she was comfortable, and pretending to feed her a pellet or two out of his hand.

When he was sure he'd pampered her for a reasonable amount of time (after all, when he'd worked at the stables, it was not rare for him to take some time out of his day just to visit with the animals), he turned. He feigned surprise when he saw the King standing a good distance away, wrapped in his desert cloak, backlit by the full red moon.

He fell to his knees, and the King motioned for him to rise, as usual. He looked up at the tall man, searching his features for any sign of suspicion, but all he saw was a mild, cynical amusement. The King waved at him to follow, and strode off toward the edge of the camp.

Link was not sure if he had the time to get on Epona's back and ride off before the King could order his men to shoot him down. He hesitated, one foot toward his horse and the other toward the King, and his eyes flitted between the two. His charm of courage had gone cold in his breast pocket, and his heart fluttered weakly in his chest.

The King turned, giving a wide frown, as if inquiring as to what kept his servant busy enough to ignore his divine ruler. Link gulped, and after glancing back once more to the fire-red warhorse that stood calmly at her post, he followed his King out into the desert night.


	28. The Little Gerudo Girl

Hey everyone! I just wanted to thank all of you for reading. I appreciate you sacrificing your time to read this, and especially if you take even more time to leave feedback. Though the ride is far from over, I'm glad you've come this far along the twists and turns with me. So thanks again, and I hope you continue to enjoy it.

* * *

"Two worms squirm in the sand,  
they do not mate,  
they do not fight,  
For they have no reason to.

They only write for us  
in the sinking dune  
an answer to a question  
we have not asked.

At the end of the struggle (if it is a struggle)  
one falls quietly to the earth;  
the victor (if it is a victor)  
leaves to us this knowledge:

There is, and has been,  
one Worm,  
for the Worm is eternal."

Rubooru Bada, from _White Sand: The Collected Poetry of Obra Garud_

* * *

Link hadn't realized exactly how tired the King looked these past few weeks. But it seemed tonight, of all nights, he was sleepless, fatigued. He stared at the shadowy, walled city jutting from the dunes across the sandy valley, and folded his hands behind his back. The wrinkles in his face seemed to deepen, the rings under his eyes darkened in the red moonlight.

He said nothing for a long time. He seemed satisfied with merely having someone stand beside him as he viewed the horizon.

"It's strange. This is the town my great-grandfather left to conquer your land. And here I am, conquering it back." He turned his face toward the moon, red light shining against his features. His eyes seemed like amber in the night, his beard like unworldly fire. "Sometimes I wish I could give it up. That I could lay down my sword and crown and wander into the sands, never to return." He paused to smile. "But I will return. They say a Gerudo's soul never leaves the desert, no matter how far he may wander. Perhaps mine is still out there. I suppose this is what I'm here to find out."

The King watched the full moon for a while in silence, while Link stared at his boots. He occasionally glanced toward the distant city, wondering if he would be able to escape the camp before the soldiers awoke to begin their predawn duties. Perhaps, if the King was hasty with his monologuing, Link could leave during the changing of the night guard; that would be easiest—

"It is all about necessity, I suppose. Yes, that is what my grandmother used to tell me: this is my duty. All of it. The kingship, the campaigns, the executions and negotiations. All for unity." He closed his eyes for a moment, and a harsh smile crossed his face. "The Gorons would not pay the necessary price for unity. The Zoras were too cowardly to even think about facing it." He turned to Link. "And what about you? Are you a coward?"

Link thought about the stables, about the yellow-haired girl, the trip to Kakariko, his ascent up Eldin, the months he spent under the Sheikahs' tender care, the ride to the desert, his capture—and every time he'd faltered along the way. _Yes_ , he answered inwardly. _I am a coward._

"I don't think you are." Link lifted his eyes to the King's, face contorted. The uncanny way the man answered his thoughts sent a shiver through him. "I can see that you're not. You've been taught that cowardice is the only way to survive. And it is true, to an extent. But the mighty are never cowards. They are brave, and ruthless." He turned again, but instead of facing the city of Obra Garud, his eyes wandered to the boundless horizon beyond it, where the red moon set rapidly. "Tomorrow, we follow the blood moon to the west. It is a place I do not wish to go, but perhaps there I will find what I need."

Link blinked. He mulled over the King's words rapidly in his head. If he were skipping the city altogether and going to the west, then whatever traps Ahnadib had laid for him he would not face; whatever forces the Obra Garud army were mustering he would not fight. But he had mentioned he would be conquering the city… Perhaps it was a question of when, and from what direction. Link tried his best to hide his confusion, but the King met his stare, locking him there and examining him.

He heard a sound somewhere below them, in the trough of the dune. He ignored it, telling himself that he could not sense the sand shifting, could not hear the small sounds of frantic footsteps as something crept up the side of the hill. He told himself that he was not aware of the shallow intake of breath, the light grunt of a small throat.

The King turned, and Link, spying his cue, turned with him. Out of the darkness, from the shadows of the dune, tumbled a girl, barely older than a child. Her eyes narrowed angrily beneath her short-cropped red hair, her brown skin shone with sweat. Her lips drew back over gritted teeth, and she lifted a fist, something long and sharp clenched between her fingers. She positioned her knife blade-first, muscles flexing, and rushed toward the King, letting loose a harrowing screech.

Link stepped forward, reaching out a hand to stop her, but she focused solely and completely on her target. The King turned calmly, stretching out a long arm quickly, almost leisurely, and gripped her about the throat. He lifted her from the ground, and with a gasp she started to kick. She swung the knife up at his arm, blade clanging against his armor, and seeing she could not cut through his metal plates, she dropped the knife and clutched at the hand around her throat. She kicked furiously, but her legs were barely longer than a child's—a girl of her size, even if she landed a good strike, would not do much damage to a man like the King.

Link stepped forward, reaching out to the tall man, but he could not plead. He wasn't sure if it was because he knew he could not risk exposing his ability to hear and speak, or because he was simply afraid to protest. But, as if in response to his agitated movements, the King loosened his grip on the girl's throat.

"What brings you into my company at this late hour?" he asked through gritted teeth.

The girl gasped for air, face contorted in rage. "You… Your men… killed my mother."

"I apologize. I'm sure it was nothing personal. But I'm also sure it was necessary."

At this reply the girl screamed again, striking out furiously. The King tightened his grip, his mouth spreading into something that might have resembled a smile had it been on the face of anyone else. It seemed a reluctant grimace, almost an admission of defeat.

"Little assassin, this is all the knowledge I can give you before we part. Know what is necessary. Her death was, and so is yours."

Link almost cried out. He flung himself toward them, reaching for the King's unoccupied hand, so that he could not draw his blade and cut the girl down while she dangled helplessly at the end of his grip. But before Link could spring within reach of the King's free arm, a sickening, blood-chilling snap echoed across the dunes. The girl's legs stilled, and her head drooped limply, her arms falling to her sides. The King dropped her and she crumpled in the sand, legs curling under her, eyes staring blankly into the sky.

Link fell to his knees by her side, releasing a cry with an intensity that surprised even him. He reached to her wrists, her neck, to check if her blood still flowed. He smoothed back her hair from her eyes to see if they still blinked. His heart beat furiously, and his hands, weak and useless, wandered between all the places on a body Impa had taught him indicated if the soul still resided inside. It seemed this girl's had left, already drifting into the desert air, well beyond his reach.

He shook, turning to eye the King over his hunched shoulder. There was no triumph in his face, as Link would come to expect from a lesser man at besting his enemy, but he could see something of a derisive smile pass over his lips.

The King's teeth shone in the light. "You really do like caring for animals."

Link clenched his jaw, white hand still gripping the dead girl's wrist, and kept himself on his knees, kept his head down. It took all his strength to stop himself from getting up, grasping the knife the girl had held only moments before, and trying to finish what she started. But he just trembled, red-faced, as the King strode up behind him.

"Do not concern yourself with the dead," the sovereign said. "It will do you no good."

He knew he had no right to take up the girl's weapon and finish her deed. She had thrown herself at the King blade-first, and he'd defended himself. But he didn't need to kill her so ignobly, after she'd already dropped her knife. He didn't need to take the time to impart wisdom to her before he snapped her neck. Link bit his lip, loosening his grip on the would-be assassin, and let the King pull him to his feet. He clenched his fists at his sides and averted his gaze from the monarch's face, preferring to stare at the sand below him.

The King did not seem to mind. He turned away from Link, cape billowing in the desert wind, and retreated from the corpse. His gait was calm, joyless. Link, knowing he had no other choice, followed him back to camp, glancing back only once at the body of the young girl, deathly pale under the setting moon.

* * *

For days, Haema spoke of nothing but Link's complicity in the assassination attempt. But after smacking him around a bit, getting no answers from the frightened, confused stableboy, who had no means of relaying instructions to an accomplice, he and other officers had to admit that the girl had acted alone. It was generally agreed upon that no militant Gerudo faction would send a girl so young and weak to tackle a threat as big as the King of Hyrule. It certainly hadn't been the work of Ahnadib; she knew better.

So the incident, though it left the bivouac in an uproar and postponed the King's march to the deep western desert, passed by without further casualties. The body of the girl was dragged far from the camp and burned, and Link, exonerated, was left alone again to tend to Epona. But despite the widespread acceptance that he had nothing to do with the assassination attempt except for having been with the King in the wrong place at the wrong time (a few of the officers knew that their ruler had taken a somewhat puzzling liking to the boy and often walked with him), he was kept on a tight leash.

Gorman, as well as a few other men, were tasked with watching him night and day, and when they put him to work, there was always a guard or two keeping an eye on him (of course, ever since his mysterious arrival at the King's camp, it was ordered that he be watched every hour of the day, but since Link had made their duties so easy, the guards had neglected them, for the most part). He knew, under this renewed watch, he would not have an opportunity to ride to Obra Garud unseen. He had squandered his chance when he had chosen to accompany the King on his walk rather than jump on Epona's back and gallop off, taking his chances with the royal archers and the pack of hounds that would no doubt follow him to the city.

He spent nearly a day chastising himself for both his lack of skill and his bad luck. If only he'd left the officers' tent earlier, or later, the King might not have found him at Epona's post. If he'd done the courageous thing and attempted to take the horse while her lead was still loosened, he might've been able to outrun the guards—after all, in the King's own words, Epona was the fastest and most fearless mount he'd ever ridden. He spent hours berating himself as he worked, trying to ignore the burn of watchful eyes on his back.

But by the time three days had passed since the incident, when the excitement had died down, and the King continued his preparations to march into the west, Link had recovered from the initial disappointment of his failure. He might not have another chance to escape to Obra Garud, but the King's attack on the city seemed at least a while into the future, if he was planning on making his way into the western desert first. Link could not guess what lay in wait for the King out in those empty sands, but his cryptic words about souls and spirits and the desert's ancient, magical wind echoed in his head.

He was not sure if he was supposed to accompany the King into the desert or not—it appeared as if the route they would take was long, dangerous, and without water. Some men admitted that it would be best to leave the horses in the care of the stablehands while they rode better-suited beasts of burden into the sands. Since they could not secure dromedaries from Obra Garud, with its wide, metal gates shut to them, they decided to pick out the strongest and fastest among their own stock, already worn down by the journey from Onrago.

Link sometimes watered and fed these animals, but they did not seem to require much care, especially from a boy like him, who knew only about horses and hounds and other animals commonly found in the Capital. He doubted the King would take him along—so whatever it was in the wide desert that had attracted the monarch's attention would remain a mystery to him, or so that's what he gathered when listening to the stablehands. The King himself hadn't condescended to visit him in the past three days, so there was nothing to be heard from him.

Link just did his work, silently, glumly. Sometimes, if he kept his eyes closed for too long, he'd see the face of the girl from the desert, neck twisted, pupils unmoving under the bright moon. When he thought about her too hard, he'd find himself gripping his broom, his brush, or his own wrist with such frustration his knuckles would whiten. Sometimes the face of the little assassin blurred, and he'd see the features of the yellow-haired girl, expressionless on that brown skin.

His ire and sullenness was not lost on the other stablehands. Sometimes he'd overhear them talking about him, sometimes catch them staring at him as he did his furious work. He didn't have the inclination to stare back, or to wave them away; he just continued his duties, faithful as ever. In his head, he tried to conceive an alternate plan, to find a way to attempt a second escape. But nothing came to him. His head was empty except for the King, his work, and the two faces of the girls, so different in shape, color and circumstances, but both with the sinking universality of death in their eyes.

He had no escape route, no recourse, no resolve left. The little charm Merel had given him sat useless in his pocket, and his heart could gather no courage from it. Even Epona seemed to know he'd given up, and despite her occasional nuzzles and snorts, she did not attempt to cheer or reinvigorate him. She could probably sense it was too late.

It had always amazed him how horses could be so right so often.


	29. The Dancer

"A friend once told me that Obra Garud was the most luxurious city this side of the world. But while we praise it for its lush pillows, mouthwatering delicacies, bathhouses and other meaningless pleasures, we must not forget its rich culture of the arts. There are dozens of schools of dance, thousands of public mosaics, a long tradition of poetry, some of the world's most beautiful architecture—and all this originates from what was once just a hideout for outlaws. I have only danced once in Obra Garud, and I will never forget the event. Or at least, I would like to say I will never forget it. Even one night of the best Gerudo wine will make you forget almost anything."

Errachella, Eldine Performer

* * *

Two nights after the assassination attempt, and the night before the King was to leave his camp for the deep desert, the stables had an unusual visitor.

She was young, female, and most decidedly Gerudo (that in itself was certainly not unusual), but unlike most of her countrywomen, she was not decked in leather armor, nor in the usual trousers and band of the common folk. She had wandered in from the dark in a long robe of purple silk, gilded at the edges with intricate designs of the moon and its phases. She wore it around her shoulders as one would wear a blanket on a cold day, and her small, golden shoes poked out delicately from its hem. Her anklets and bracelets jingled pleasantly as she knocked on the posts that comprised the temporary stable, smiling shyly.

Gorman was not sure what to make of her. He took one look at her delicate stance, her unmatched beauty, her short hair impeccably combed across her forehead, the jewels adorning her face and hands, and decided she was a ransom, some noblewoman's daughter, who'd escaped her prison tent and wandered off. He gripped her gently by the arm and tried to lead her away, turning and telling another man to fetch the guards, but one of Gorman's underlings, an excitable, black-haired stablehand, emerged from the shadows and called to him.

"Wait, wait, I know her," he said, trotting up to them. The woman smiled at him thankfully, and he took her hand. "She was with one of the caravans that passed by us on the way from Onrago."

"That's right," she said. Her voice was soft, colored a little by the languages of the desert, but she spoke Hylian well enough. "We didn't make it to Obra Garud before they shut their gates—and they won't open them even for a little caravan like ours."

"Well, can you blame 'em?" the stablehand laughed. "They've got the world's mightiest army at their door; they're probably scared shitless."

A subtle look of disdain passed over the woman's face, but no one seemed to notice. It hovered over her features for a fraction of a moment before she settled into a shy smile. "I suppose so. But we're camped a little ways away. The others didn't want to come too close to your encampment, but we've run out of food and can't make the trip back to Onrago. I thought… if you had any left… since you know me, you might… you know…" She drifted off, cheeks reddening slightly.

"Of course," the black-haired man said. "There ought to be some food left around here, I'll see what I can do for you."

"Thank you. Such kindness," the woman started, syllables morphing into guttural Gerudo when her words of thanks intensified. The black-haired man winked at her and slipped off into the shadows, leaving her alone with Gorman and Link.

"So," the stable master started awkwardly, if not a little doubtfully. "How do you know him again?"

"A little more than halfway to Obra Garud, we came upon your army. He and I met on the road, and he gave me a gold coin to perform for him."

"Perform?"

"Yes, well, I'm a dancer." She lifted her head, pride glowing in her lovely brown features. "I was on my way to Obra Garud to see if I could start my career there."

"Quite poor timing, I should say," Gorman admitted.

The woman lowered her head in defeat. "Yes, well, war and hunger do not wait for you, so you cannot wait for them either." She lifted her eyes. "Besides, I have no doubt your King of Hyrule will settle this quickly and peacefully. I don't think even Ahnadib will have the means to resist an army like this."

Gorman seemed to relax a little. "So… a village girl on her way to see if she can make it in the big city, eh?" he smiled, scratching the back of his head. "That's a familiar story. You ever heard of Errachella?"

"Of course," she answered. Something of a smile passed over her colored lips. "Every performer looks up to her. Especially considering her disability." Her quiet shyness seemed to melt away with the words.

"Well, we have our own deaf worker here, and he seems to do all right." At Gorman's gesture, her bright yellow eyes glanced over to Link for a second, and he looked at his feet.

"Does he dance, though?"

"I'm afraid not." The woman laughed, and Link feigned confusion. He did not have to play at bewilderment with too much effort, since he still had no idea of whom the two spoke. He thought he remembered hearing Talm mention a name like that, once in passing, but for the most part, their conversation eluded him.

When the black-haired stableman returned, some leftovers in hand, he gave it to the woman and she ate eagerly. "Goddesses' love," she murmured. "I was so hungry."

She ate with her hands, balling up the dry rice as best she could without getting any stuck under her long, painted fingernails. To Link's surprise, the stablehand produced a silver bottle from his sleeve, offering it to her.

"You couldn't have—" Gorman started, when he glimpsed the bottle.

"From the officers' supply. They have more than they know what to do with. A friend of a friend gave it to me when he gave me the meal."

Gorman took the bottle, twisting off the top and smelling it. "We'd better not tell a soul." He tasted it and cringed. "Oh, good stuff, ain't it?"

"You bet. Hey, give the kid some, he's been down lately." They turned to Link, who took the bottle shyly. He suspected that the black-haired stablehand, who wore a mischievous smile, expected him to suffer a little from it. Link put the bottle to his lips and drank, fully intending to displease the stablehand.

He had had some strong Old Riko whisky, and some pretty heavy rice wine from Kakariko, but none had burned his throat like this. He froze, lips still around the mouth of the bottle, as the fiery contents made their way down his gullet into his stomach. He made a face but swallowed what was left in his mouth, coughing a bit.

Both the stablehand and Gorman laughed at his cringe, one more kindly than the other. Link handed the bottle back, rubbing his stomach where the liquor warmed him, and smacked his lips, trying to banish the taste, and the singe, from his mouth.

The stablehand gave the bottle to the dancer, and she took a brave swig, laughing and thanking him for his hospitality. The stablehand grinned at her. "I was thinking, maybe, to pay us back you might give us a demonstration."

The young woman reddened, but with slight drunkenness or embarrassment, Link could not tell. "Oh, no, I couldn't…" she started, shyness creeping back into her features. The stablehand gave her a disappointed look, and insisted, goading her by pushing the bottle back into her hands and encouraging her to drink it.

Link wasn't sure if he was willing to sit here and watch the stablehand harass a laughing woman all night—at least not sober—so he motioned to Gorman for another drink. The stable master gave it to him, smiling almost proudly. Over the course of the next half hour or so, a few other stablehands, one privy digger, and two soldiers crowded into the area, either drawn by the strong smell of whatever alcohol it was they drank, or the rare sound of a woman's laughter.

After the stablehand's annoying persistence, and seeing that she had a growing audience, the dancer finally gave in. "Oh, _all_ _right_ ," she laughed, pushing his hands from her waist when he tried to manually make her sway.

She made her way to the center of the circle of men, still wrapped in her silk robe, and bowed slightly, smiling. "I need some music," she said.

"We don't have no Gerudo drums or nothin'," one of the men said.

"That's fine. I can dance to anything."

"A drinking song?" one suggested, and the others laughed. But to their delight and surprise, she acquiesced.

"If you can keep a beat, no problem."

A few men pulled up small benches or seated themselves on the sandy ground, arguing over which ditty they should sing. One grabbed a pair of horseshoes and started banging them together in a familiar rhythm. Most of the men seemed to recognize the beat and struck up the song, clapping or stomping. They were generally off-tune, singing in a multitude of ranges and with a whole host of different lyrics, but the melody was there, and the dancer could pick it out of the chaos.

She raised her arms and waited for a downbeat, nodding her head twice before dropping her weight—and her robe. Beneath she wore nothing but a thin strap of silk across her breasts, a shining blue sash on her hips, and a pair of translucent pants, trimmed with gold. As the robe fell to the sand and she stepped forward, belly glistening with jewels and gold chains, the metallic beads on her hips and wrists jingling to the beat, a lewd cheer rose from the men. She seemed to revel in it, twisting her body and smiling widely, making as much noise with her large jewelry as the men did with their singing, stomping and whistling. She twirled and swayed, unwinding the sash from her middle and holding it above her head, following its light, translucent length through the air.

Both the woman and the silk seemed to merge into one being, one smooth, eternally moving entity. Link sat dumbfounded at the woman's movement, at the way her gold-clad feet lifted and fell, at the way the silk danced like a small, diaphanous river. At one point she inverted herself, legs rolling over her in one smooth motion, back bending, and when she twisted upright again, Link could not for the life of him figure out how she'd done it. He was so enthralled, the sounds of the singing men seemed to fade away into nothing, leaving only the dancer, only the strange story she told with her movements. It was a lovely, almost spiritual dance, and Link couldn't help but grit his teeth when the men destroyed her tranquility by insisting she change her routine in their favor.

"Do what you did for me that one time!" the black-haired stablehand shouted, as if he wanted to show her off. She looked at him and smiled, nodding. But Link could see her eyes narrow, a wrinkle of displeasure creep from the edge of her mouth. But he said nothing as the woman abandoned her slow, elegant movements in favor of a more passionate, overtly sensual routine.

A few of the men cheered when she came near them, wriggling like a snake. She would single a man out and lock eyes with him, moving her body back and forth, maybe tickling him with her silk and teasing him with the proximity of her lips before moving away, much to the delight of the others watching. She divided her time evenly between all the men, even an awkward-looking Gorman, before settling her eyes on Link.

He stared into her yellow irises, bright against the purple makeup that surrounded them, and he saw no mirth in her face. He saw no sensuality, no frivolity. There was a determination in them that surprised him, and when she stepped toward him, thrusting one hip out, then the other, he found he couldn't move. She spun, arm outstretched, and her silk ensnared him, falling around his shoulders. She hovered over him, moving back and forth, locking him helplessly at the end of her gaze.

Somewhere far away, he could hear some of the other men jeering, laughing at his red cheeks and wide eyes, shouting lewd things before falling back into the chorus of their song. He gulped, looked at the woman's eyes as she straddled him, jewelry jingling raucously in his ears. He sat absolutely petrified as she leaned over him, lips opening slightly.

She turned and started moving against him, drawing the silk over her head, blocking her face from view for a fraction of a second as her lips touched his ear.

"Trust me," she whispered.

It had come as such a surprise, Link didn't have much of a choice not to. His mouth fell open, his heart jumped into his throat, and the dancer swung the silk around his shoulders again before her tongue touched his earlobe. The men who could see it burst into uproarious shouts, cheering and stomping with renewed vigor. The dancer pulled away for a moment, loosening her grip on Link, before grasping his cheek and opening his already agape mouth wider.

His head nearly burst when she lay her lips over his, her soft breath flowing into his mouth. The men around him went mad, laughing and roaring, jeering at him, and he sat deathly still as the dancer pushed her tongue past his lips. He decided it wouldn't have been an altogether unpleasant sensation under better circumstances, and he assuaged some of his fear with her strange warmth, the way she gripped his shoulders as if reassuring him.

Something slid into his mouth that was no part of her. It tasted metallic, unnatural, and had the consistency of a stiff, raw vegetable. When she withdrew her mouth, she nodded at him, urging him with her eyes. He bit down on it slightly, and it cracked almost imperceptibly between his teeth. She smiled widely, drawing the silk from his shoulders and sliding off him. Her leg traced a smooth, elegant arc as she danced away from him, looking back once over her shoulder to meet his eyes.

He swallowed. Down his throat sank whatever it was she had gifted to him, leaving a bitter, almost moribund taste in his mouth. He shuddered a little, face still red, knees weak, as the other men laughed.

"Hey, how come _he_ gets that treatment?" one of them complained.

"Because he's prettier than any of you by far!" she laughed, twisting her body. She moved on, leaving a petrified Link in her wake, and continued her dance.

He didn't know how long she gyrated and twisted—he occupied himself more with the thoughts of her mysterious words, and her large, colored lips opening against his.

She lavished her attentions on the remaining members of her audience before twirling once around and bowing. Some of the men tried to strike up another chorus, but she shook her head. "You gentlemen can't make me dance forever," she panted. "Unless, of course, someone is willing to compensate me." She winked mischievously.

One of the men said he had several gold pieces in his trousers, but seemed unwilling to back up that claim by emptying his pockets. Another said he could get her any alcohol she wanted from the officers' mess, and another said he would give her his children, if she wanted them.

"What am I going to do with your children?" she asked.

"I dunno, they ain't in you yet!" he replied, before laughing so obnoxiously Link had to repress the urge to cover his ears. A sudden wave of nausea overtook him, and he swallowed a lump in his throat.

He bent over, holding his head, telling himself that he couldn't have heard that joke, that he was deaf and therefore unbothered by its boorishness. The dancer laughed nervously, turning to look at her black-haired ally. The stablehand, after he stopped laughing and decided he might as well get jealous, told the man off and commanded him to fetch more drinks. He disappeared like a shamed dog, and the atmosphere returned to conviviality.

Gorman had nothing but compliments for the woman. He lay no hands on her, merely told her he was sure she would find a patron in the big city (he seemed to forget it might be a different Obra Garud, after the King besieged it as he had Onrago, but he was inordinately drunk at this point and probably forgot many things). Some of the other men left, some stayed to see if there was more alcohol to be had, or more dancing.

Link just sat on his small stool, holding his head. The painful dizziness that had overcome him had not left, even though the ill-mannered man had. The laughter between the woman and the workers was again comfortable, but Link could not quell the terrible feeling he had in his stomach. He clenched his fists and waited for the feeling to pass, sitting still as the others laughed and talked.

One man (Link was not sure if it was the one who had volunteered to seek out more drinks or the one that had been commanded—his vision had blurred) returned with libations. For the next half hour or so, as Link sat silent and unnoticed in the corner, the dancer and the others prattled and joked. She managed to get two of the men to arm wrestle for the favor of a kiss. While she watched them have at one another, her eyes wandered to Link.

"Hey, boys, what about him?"

"What, we don't want a kiss from _him_."

"No, look at him. Are you sure he hasn't had too much?"

Suddenly Gorman was standing over Link, red-faced and teetering, staring down at him with wide eyes. "Damn, he hasn't had much at _all_."

"Still, you'd better lie him down."

Some rough arms gripped Link's and pulled him off his bench, laying him on the warm sand. The pain in his stomach intensified, but he rolled to his side as Gorman grabbed a horse's blanket and threw it over him before returning to the festivities.

Link did not know how long he lay there, in dizziness and pain, waiting to fall asleep. He gripped his stomach and turned, as the sounds of laughing, conversation, and possibly another dance faded into a backdrop of painful ringing. All he could see were vague shadows moving against the light, all he could feel was the pain, the nausea bubbling up in him.

He turned over, lifting himself slightly off the sand, and vomited. He wrenched, coughing, and a small cry of misery escaped him. It apparently attracted the attention of the others, since after a few lurches, when his heaving was dry and painful, a pair of hands gripped his shoulders.

"Oh shit," someone said. It sounded vaguely like Gorman, but Link couldn't be sure.

"I _told_ you he had too much," came the solicitous voice of the dancer.

"No, look, there's blood."

"Goddesses' great tits, he's not in trouble, is he?"

"His majesty will _kill_ us. This is his warhorse's caretaker."

Suggestions from several voices flew over Link. He was blind to every mouth they came from, and could no longer tell whose voice was whose. Someone suggested they take him out into the desert as far as they could and leave him, another said they should just wait it out. Another, some female voice, coming from a great distance, said something vague about a caravan and a doctor.

 _No, not a doctor_ , Link thought _. A doctor tried to kill me._

"No use asking him if he's all right—he can't hear you anyway."

 _No, she tried to kill me._

 _The dancer._

 _The daughter._

 _The doctor's dancer._

He couldn't wrestle meaning from the tangles of words in his mind. He just groaned, head spinning, stomach burning, muscles aching terribly.

 _She's killed me, oh gods, she's killed me._

He coughed up blood and struggled to breathe.

 _Why would she kill me?_

"He looks terrible."

"I'm telling you, there's a physician with us, in the caravan. We just have to get him out of here without anyone seeing."

The hallucinatory shape of a shadowy Eldine wolf hovered before him, composed of formless words, blinking with storm-blue eyes. _The only way home is in death. I will be better for it._

"You look strong, you carry him and follow me. No one will know."

 _Will I?_

"That's right, gently, oh gods, tomorrow we'll be laughing about all this, won't we? Now follow me out, I'll lead the way."

 _She's killed me._

The words faded in Link's head, echoing out into nothing, as he slipped from consciousness and into painful darkness.


	30. Ahnadib's Table

Hey folks! Chapter 30, hooray! Thanks for sticking around for so long and for leaving your thoughts. It's been a great time so far. This is the part of the story where I decided to start naming the chapters, because... to be honest I don't know. I guess I just like seeing chapters with titles. Anyway, thanks again for reading, and I hope you enjoy!

* * *

"Medicine man, cut up my skin,  
Doctor witch, burn away my sin,  
I'll pay gold and silver rupee  
To cure this sickness that is me."

Folksong of the Plains Provinces

* * *

"I can't believe you gave that much to him."

The voice sounded familiar, but still too distant for Link to pin down. He tried to move his legs, tried to struggle toward the sound (sometimes the idea of _sound_ still surprised and bewildered him), but he couldn't.

 _Am I home?_

"Well, _you're_ the physician, he's your problem now."

Link groaned, pain churning up from inside him, and his throat burned horribly. He spasmed, blind, and clenched his fists.

"Oh, gods, _all over himself_."

"Lucky there wasn't much left in his stomach."

"That's hardly a comfort."

Link could swear he could place the voices, he could see the faces from which they came, but only hazily. The only distinction he could draw between them were shapes etched in red. He saw a three-pronged symbol, he saw thick stripes over cheekbones, he saw the diamond mark of a healer, and he saw two eyes, painted red and glowing slightly, staring back at him, the long red tear from each twitching as its owner squinted.

 _Palo_ , Link said in his head. He wanted to ask if he had come home, if he was dead. Maybe Palo could only see him through those red tattoos, on the other side of the veil of death. Maybe he would be able to tell the others that Link was sorry. Sorry he abandoned them, sorry he could not stop the King's march into the desert, sorry he had died so ignobly—at the end of a stranger's tongue.

"Hey, he's twitching a little."

"Get him water. Get him lots of it."

Something cool was lowered to his lips. The acidic taste of vomit still sat on his tongue, but when someone pinched his mouth open and poured down fresh, cold water, he drank it eagerly. With each gulp, the pain in his stomach subsided a little, and he slowly ascended from deep unconsciousness, as if swimming upward to the white-lit surface of water. He swallowed, sensation returning to his tongue, his face, his hands and chest.

When he had control of his eyes again, he opened them fully. He could make out a few shapes emerging from the light, colored with a haze of confusion. Link did not have the strength to try to wipe the blurriness out of his eyes, so he squinted as best he could. Slowly, recognizable features materialized.

The first face he saw looming above him, wearing a contrite frown, was the dancer's. "She… killed me," Link croaked. The water had helped, but his throat still burned with the effort of speaking.

"She certainly tried to," came the reply. It was a deep, male voice, wholly unfamiliar to him, and when the face it belonged to emerged from the haze, it took Link a minute to recognize it. "She gave you double the amount I told her to."

"Well, it's your fault that no one can read your handwriting," the dancer replied. "And besides, he's fine now."

"T… alporom," Link croaked, slowly.

Impa's father gazed down at him, red eyes narrowed severely. His mouth was drawn taut in what Link surmised might be frustration, but might've been deep thought. He started to mutter as he held his hand to Link's forehead, checking for fever.

"We… rescued you…" Link muttered, trying to recall how he knew the man.

"Well, you tried. My poor daughters don't know when to let a man plan his own escape," he said, fingers still probing Link's forehead. "They come careening in after me the first sign of danger—it's like they don't trust me. They think me a frail old man."

Suddenly Link realized that there were a few people missing from this scene, people he would very much like to see. "Where's Impa…" he rasped.

Talporom returned from his bitter reverie. "She's here. So is Talm, so is Palo. They're all fine." Link sighed and closed his eyes. "No, that does not give you leave to fall back asleep." Link grit his teeth as the strong hands of the physician pulled him up, propping him against the pillow at his back. "You need to tell me how you feel."

The more vertical Link moved, the harder his head throbbed. He lifted a fist and held it to his burning temple. "Not… good."

"Not a surprise. Do you still feel like you're going to vomit?"

"No."

"How about the pain?"

"Just… in my head."

"What did you dream about?"

The last question caught Link by surprise. He lifted his wide eyes to Talporom, momentarily forgetting about the throbbing pain in his head. The Sheikah man furrowed his white eyebrows, frowning gently. "I didn't. I don't usually—"

"Good. Sometimes these herbs can traumatize a man from the mind out. I've read it can give you images that stay with you, if you take too much." He paused for a moment to eye the dancer with disapproval. She threw up her jingling hands and rolled her eyes. She stepped back into the hazy dark, and Talporom again turned his attention to Link. "Can you stand up?"

"Maybe… I… how did I…"

"Save your breath. For now, focus on getting your legs out from under the covers. There you go."

Sternly, but with a gentleness that surprised him, Talporom helped him out of the small cot. He shook his head, coaxing clarity back into his vision. He seemed to be under a curved white tarp, beams of sun creeping in through its holes and tears, lighting the thick dust like snow. The base of the tent-like structure was made of creaking wood, and opposite him, he spied a round, closed door.

He coughed and rubbed his eyes, before Talporom grasped one of his arms and offered support. Link's arm could barely fit over the man's broad shoulders, but he accepted the help as he was escorted out of bed and to his feet. He took a few steps toward the door, looking down at himself, at his bare toes, bare chest and greenish skin, and wondered how long he'd been asleep, and how sick he'd really been.

Talporom reached out and pushed the door open, flooding Link's vision with harsh sunlight. He lifted a hand over his eyes, and stepped forward into empty air. Talporom caught him, supported him and lowered him to the ground, and when Link's frantic heartbeat slowed, he turned to see he had stumbled out of a large wagon. Around him were high walls of dark stone, unlit torches adorning their lengths, and before him stretched a small, dirt square, crossed with wagon tracks and footprints. A few other vehicles in what he conceived was the dancer's caravan stood around the perimeter of the small square.

Next to one, seemingly deep in thought, stood Impa. She cupped her chin in one hand, decked in an odd mixture of Sheikah and Gerudo garb. She turned when she heard him emerge from the wagon, and for a moment, his heart stopped. He could only imagine how angry she would be, how frustrating and disappointing his capture must've been to her. He worried for a moment that she knew all about his inner betrayal, about the weeks in the King's camp he'd spent dangerously close to contentment.

But when she saw him, a large, relieved smile crossed her face. She strode toward him, arms spreading, and his heart again pounded into regularity. She practically ripped him from her father to squeeze him tight, before releasing him and laying a hand on his shoulder.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"I think so," he replied, unsure.

She still smiled at his answer. "Welcome to Obra Garud."

* * *

They had saved his things. In the wagons of the dancer's caravan, he found his sword and shield, his hunting bow, some of his clothes, and Talporom's old green hat (the man had said that Link was more than welcome to have it—in fact, he had long since forgotten it existed). Although few of his clothes would do him good in the desert heat, he was still thankful when Impa told him she'd kept them. It comforted him to know that she'd had enough faith in his survival to bother looking after his old things. According to her, the others had not been so sure.

"During the raid, when we saw you were missing, Talm and I wanted to go back to help you," she told him. "The prisoners went on ahead with Palo, and we doubled back to see if we could find you. You'd already disappeared, and we couldn't stick around to wait for you. I'm sorry."

Link shook his head. He rubbed the back of his neck where some bug had bitten him earlier in the afternoon, and leaned against the side of the wagon. The others were elsewhere in the dimly lit courtyard, procuring food and water for the night. "You always told me how important it is to stick to a plan. You did what you could without risking everyone."

"So you _have_ learned a thing or two in these past months. Yes, I had to get to the rendezvous point with the prisoners. By that time we could see the King rally his troops to follow us back to Ahnadib's camp. So we set off toward Onrago."

Link knew that had been a part of her plan, but he still could not stop a pang of guilt from pulsing through him when he thought about how he'd pointed out the camp's location to the King and his men.

"Of course, we worried about you, but when the siege of Onrago started, we had no time to linger and see if you were with the army. We had to get out the west gate and deeper into the desert. We could not know if you were taken prisoner or killed—there was no reason for us to think they would spare you. Don't tell him I told you this, but every once in a while I'd find Palo out in the desert, scouring it for your spirit. He never found you, but he was still convinced you were dead. It wasn't until Ahnadib introduced us to Galra that we had any hope of finding out."

"Galra?"

"She's the dancer. She followed the army for a while in her caravan, spying for us. I told her to keep an eye out for you, and she reported to me the most peculiar thing. She said there was a deaf worker matching your description at the camp, caring for the King's warhorse."

Link tried to hide the self-accusatory grimace as he stuttered to explain. "Impa, I—"

"It was clever of you," she said, before he could throw himself down that particular hole. "And you kept up the act for so long. An admirable deception." He lifted his eyes to her wide smile. "I wanted to come for you the moment I heard you were alive, but we were still out in the desert in Galra's caravan. If the King decided to come after us, we only had a few tarps and camels to use as protection. Ahnadib told us to wait until we got to Obra Garud so we'd have a wall to retreat behind, even if the gates were closed to everyone else—I tell you that woman's got more connections in high places than you can imagine. When Galra offered to act for us, I asked my father to give her the means to get you back."

"She insisted." Talporom's voice echoed suddenly across the small square, and he emerged from one of the wagons with a large basket of flatbread in his hands. He knelt across from his daughter and Link, unrolling a ratty carpet over the dirt and setting the basket on it. "I have to say I wondered why both my daughters—and Palo, even—insisted so adamantly that we rescue you. I hadn't heard any reports of your skill or exploits, I didn't even know who you were." He paused to call Talm to the meal. She arrived with Palo, carrying a bowl of reddish paste and a jug of water, and sat down next to them. "But if Impa has even a sliver of the insight my mother had, I have an obligation to listen to her."

"Never mind the rest of us were saying the same thing," Talm said bitterly. She ripped a piece of bread and dipped it into the paste.

"Don't give me that," Talporom said, and Talm stuffed the bread into her mouth almost defiantly.

Link reached for his own piece, stomach rumbling. He did not know how long he'd gone without food. "H… how long was I… sick?"

"About a day and a half," Talporom answered. "The herb works fast, once you break the stem. Before that, nothing. That's how Galra was able to give it to you without harming herself." He paused to take a small, delicate bite of flatbread. "But now that your ordeal is over, I need you to tell me everything. You had free reign of the camp, or so Galra tells us. Everything you saw or heard, you will relay to me and Ahnadib."

Link glanced up at him, all his plans and resolutions reemerging in his head. He nodded, thankful that the Sheikah man seemed only concerned with what information Link could give him, rather than his inner motivations and duplicitous actions. If anything, Talporom was practical, like his daughter, and Link could only hope he did not hold grudges.

"Tonight, if she can see us, we will talk to her. No doubt she'll finally convince the Obra Garud council to pull themselves together. Even those bunch of sots will have to know everything they can about the King's plans if we want to survive the coming siege."

Link swallowed, hesitating for a moment. "But… that's what's strange," he said. "The King won't attack the city. Not yet."

Mouths abruptly stopped chewing, and three pairs of red eyes stared at him. He flushed a little, worried that he'd said something stupid. But he continued anyway, recalling what the monarch had told him. "He's going west, past the city and into the desert. I heard a guard say Haema was going to keep an eye on things, to keep the troops ready, just in case. He's only taking a few soldiers with him, and some camels."

Talporom knit his brow, resting his chin in his hand thoughtfully. "The west? Sounds like he's heading for the Haunted Waste. Not even the Gerudo go out there anymore."

"He told me some weird things about spirits and the desert when he talked about it—"

"Wait," Palo nearly laughed. "The King said things to you, personally? He took time out of his day to talk to _you_?"

"He thought I was deaf."

"Still—"

"Perhaps a man like him has no one else to confide in," Impa suggested.

"Now, why would you think that?" Palo asked, and she shrugged, resuming her meal.

"This is some unexpected news," Talporom said. "Ahnadib should hear it." He made a move to get up, but Impa gripped his sleeve.

"At least finish eating," she said.

He smiled and settled back down, taking another piece of bread and scooping some paste with it."Yes, all right. Gods forbid I disobey my eldest." He took another bite, smile disappearing only when Talm released an annoyed grunt and rolled her eyes at him.

* * *

Link did not have much time to admire the architecture and culture of Obra Garud as Talporom led him through the streets. The building in which Ahnadib had taken up residence was near the center of the city, where the fresh, blue water flowed freely, bubbling up from the generous oasis at the heart of the metropolis. Talporom led him down a few back streets, clean and framed with decorative awnings, plants hanging like falling water from windowsills. He stopped at a tall, slender door, more of an intricate screen than anything, decorated with the shapes of crescent moons and soaring birds. Talporom rapped twice, and an unfamiliar Gerudo face appeared on the other side of the screen.

"Welcome back," the woman muttered, unlocking the door for him. "Ahnadib wasn't expecting you, so I can't guarantee she'll have time to speak with you tonight."

"That's fine. We'll wait here."

The woman nodded and left them standing in the small entrance hall, under the warmth of the arched, torchlit white ceiling, adorned with simple mosaics. A pair of tall plants with large, fan-like leaves stood at the doorway where the woman disappeared, silk curtain shuddering behind her. The smell of something spicy met Link's nostrils, and he suddenly wished he hadn't wasted his appetite on the filling but undeniably bland paste he'd shared with the Sheikah.

They didn't wait long. The woman reemerged from behind the curtain of blue silk and beckoned them, turning on her gold-clad feet and leading them deeper into the building. At the other end of the hall, beyond a pink-lit doorway, Ahnadib waited, surrounded by a room so decorated in silk tapestries and ropes of gold it seemed more of a tent than a building. She sat back in a chair of intricate wood, carved much like the screen of her door, and beside her lounged Galra, dressed again in her long, lunar robe. A few steaming bowls of saffron rice, curry, fresh bread and wine sat on the table and set Link's stomach to rumbling all over again.

"If you wish, you may seat yourself and eat," Ahnadib said. "There is more than enough." She reached out a bejeweled hand and took a piece of bread.

"No thank you, we've eaten already." Link deflated a little at Talporom's quick reply.

"Very well. Tell me what news your friend has brought back." Ahnadib broke her bread, eyeing Link with something of a mildly sadistic grin. "I heard Galra tried to murder you with her tongue."

Link reddened, and Galra laughed. "Mother, _please_."

Talporom frowned. "Whatever went wrong, on my part or your daughter's, is in the past now. We have him back and he will recount for you whatever he can." He nodded at Link and the Hylian stepped forward, trying not to let the smell of the food distract him from his memories.

It felt strange to talk at length after remaining silent for so long, and his voice was hoarse with disuse, but he told Ahnadib everything he knew. He told her of what he'd overheard from the guards, what the King himself had said to him, the offhand comments of Haema and the other officers, the grumbles of the workmen, the gossip of the Gerudo girls who came to beg or flirt with the soldiers. Most of it was utterly useless, Link knew, but he still told Ahnadib everything.

When he was done, he saw that the bread she'd broken remained uneaten in her hand. She stared at him, yellow eyes flaring intensely, and frowned. "Are you sure he said he was going to the west?" she asked him.

"Yes," he answered. "It sounded like he was looking for something."

"From the activity in his camp, it seems like he doesn't want us to know he's leaving," Galra said quietly, leaning over to her mother.

"There are few things a man like him can seek in the Haunted Waste, and none of them bode well for us." Ahnadib paused for a moment, stroking her generous second chin. Her eyes narrowed, her wrinkled mouth pursed, and her jewelry jingled as she thought deeply. "Does he have a guide?"

"I think so," Link answered.

"He had better, or else he's not coming back from those sands." She looked at Talporom. "You have a deadseer, correct?"

"Yes." Talporom seemed a little taken aback by the question, but stood in calm silence as Ahnadib thought further.

"Galra," she said, turning to her daughter. "Is Nabru still keeping vigil at Molgera's temple?"

"Yes. She doesn't come out until sunset three days from now."

"See if you can interrupt her."

Galra almost spit out her wine. "Are you kidding? Mother, she'll _destroy_ me."

"If that woman will break her vigil for anyone, it will be you, dear." Ahnadib turned back to the two men waiting at the other end of her table. "And we do not have much time. She is the only one I trust who knows the western sands well enough."

Talporom recoiled a little. "You don't suggest we—"

"If that snake-hearted spawn of Ganond seeks something in the far reaches of the desert, we must get to it first. I know you of Hyrule might not put much faith in your own dwindling magic, but it is still strong here. There are things many of us dare not speak of that live beyond the Haunted Waste, and many more we do not even know of. There are ancient things, evil things, that could destroy this city in an instant, if put into the hands of a magician strong enough. I've no doubt the King will bring his best and wickedest sorcerers with him—I don't know what he seeks in the desert, but we must find out, and we must make sure he doesn't get his hands on it." Ahnadib reached out and took a goblet of wine in her fingers, raising it to her lips before continuing. "I will take care of things here. Talporom, I request you remain with me to continue fortifications of Obra Garud. It's probably best if we send few people into the Waste anyway." She made a face that Link couldn't interpret as anything other than a grimace. "The desert has a way of decimating large groups."

Talporom took a deep breath. "Honorable Ahnadib, you know this place and its people far better than I. It is my duty to help you in any way I can. I will decide who to send into the desert tomorrow."

Ahnadib bowed her head as if in thanks. "Let the deadseer decide. He will certainly be going, and he will be in good company. I'd trust Nabru with any life. I've trusted her with my daughter's for many years. On the morrow, Galra will lead you to her. Until then, rest well." Ahnadib dismissed them with a wave of her wine glass. "You will need it."

* * *

Enveloped in the protective light of his homeland's uncanny moon, the King donned his black cloak. A heavy feeling of portent swept over him, and the smell of black magic nearly burned his nostrils. He narrowed his eyes, gazing into the expanse of desert before him.

"Sire." Haema appeared beside him, ghostly white, omnipresent armor glinting in the night. "We have not recovered the boy."

"As expected," the King replied. "My men interrogated the stable master and some of the other soldiers that were with him that night. It seems he was poisoned, and when the privy-digger took him to see a physician, neither came back."

"Aye, sir. The digger's body was found a few miles outside of camp. There are tracks of a caravan, but it appears as if they've gone to Obra Garud."

The King clasped his hands behind his back and let loose something that was close to a sigh. "Well, General Haema, you were right. I did not believe you, since he showed no signs of ever becoming a threat to me. But if the enemy wanted him back that badly, you must be correct about his identity."

"The Sheikah are a tricky lot, sire. This could be a ploy to convince you he's someone he's not. They might want to distract you with him while they work in the shadows."

"Quite a risky rescue to pull off if he's of no value to them."

Haema was silent for a while. "They might've killed him. They might've poisoned him entirely, purposefully, after seeing him working for you. They might've thought he was a lost cause, and he was better off dead."

The King pursed his lips. "You think they killed him with the hopes that another like him might appear somewhere else? I don't think so, Haema. The Sheikah aren't known to gamble. Besides, it would take a young man like that years to come into his own."

The sound of spitting dromedaries met the King's ears, and Haema turned to watch the small procession of magicians, soldiers and animals approach. The leader of the group, a Gerudo crone with evil eyes and a toothless scowl, bowed deeply to him. She would lead him where he needed to go.

"Sire, are you sure you must leave tonight? Why not in the morning?" Haema asked.

 _Because the desert calls to me and I cannot ignore her._ "Because, we have little time. If you're right about the boy, and I'm quite sure you are, he has no doubt told his allies about my plans."

"How can he tell them anything, if he's deaf?"

"He's not deaf."

"Sire?"

The King sighed as the old woman approached him, handing him the reins of a large, strong dromedary. "He's not deaf. When we were in the desert, he heard my little assassin approach even before I did. He twitched, and for just a moment, his eyes followed the sound. He might be a trickster, but he is not trained in all Sheikah aspects of deception." He climbed atop the animal and looked down at Haema's moonlit face, contorted with the beginnings of one of his famous rages. "After I killed her, I taunted him, just to see if he would react. With each word his blood boiled a little more. No, Haema, he is not deaf. I suspect he was sent into my camp with the assumption we would think he was."

Haema's armored fingers clenched in anger. "Then, has he always had his hearing?"

"I don't believe so. He always had a reputation as the deaf stableboy. Either he's been deceiving everyone he's ever known since the moment he was born, or something, somewhere, gave him his hearing back."

"What could be powerful enough to do that?"

"I don't know, but whatever it is, I do not desire it as an enemy." The King urged his mount forward, and Haema followed beside him.

"So he was sent here to gather information, and went back willingly to Ahnadib's faction?"

"I do not know. Whether he is a mindless tool of powers greater than him, or an agent of his own free will, no one will ever be sure. It's his lot in life to struggle with that question." Strangely, the King found himself smiling.

Haema seemed nothing but confused. "Sire?"

"Take good care of the camp while I am gone. I will see you in a week or two, if things go well."

"And if not?"

"Then I suppose the army is yours to do with what you will. Make sure my demise will not go unnoticed." The King laughed and kicked his mount into a trot.

"Yes, sire! I will burn it all in your good name!" Haema called back, saluting.

The King had no doubt that should something untoward happen to him, his general would scar the land forever. Whether he returned or not, he vowed the desert would not forget the day it defied its rightful King.


	31. Nabru ahn-Molgud, Daughter of the Worm

"The Gerudo people, like any clan, boast their own wealth of religious sects. There is a whole host of desert goddesses, from their snake-headed colossi to lowly fox-nymphs, but one of the most fearsome, and misunderstood, deities of the land is the armored worm, Molgera. I say 'misunderstood' because despite the obvious gynocentricity of the cult, many male scholars, in their infinite self-aggrandizement, assume the worm is worshipped as a phallic symbol. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Molgera, it is written, births her children from her mouth, without the aid of any male. She is a symbol of fierce motherhood, of parthenogenesis, her long body representing the length of the birth canal and her mouth the opening from which all human life springs. Molgera is an all-female symbol, and to assume otherwise is a gross misinterpretation of her cult."

Edra Li, _Religions of the World_

* * *

The intricate walls and towers of Obra Garud glowed like ivory under the burning sun. The buildings were trimmed with mosaics and wooden screens so delicately carved they appeared like brownish lace from a distance. Men and (mostly) women walked among the shades of the carvings, under the arches of marble and other, rougher stone, shouting, talking, haggling. They seemed strangely unconcerned with the prospect of the King's army invading their walled city.

The market was bursting at its silk seams with buyers and sellers—barrels of spices piled high, blankets and rugs spread out and hung up for display, treasures and trinkets shining in the light. It took all Link's strength to keep his eyes off the wares and on the footsteps of his companions, whom he knew he could've easily lost in the bustle.

A pair of young girls crossed his path, laughing, smelling of oils and spices. They glanced over their small brown shoulders at him, round-eyed and smiling. One reached out a smooth arm to him, cupping her hand as if expecting him to drop a gift in her palm.

Galra saw him slacken his pace, stopping to observe the girls, and trotted up beside him. She shooed them away in fierce Gerudo, and they fled, translucent jackets billowing, sending curses and obscene gestures behind them.

"You'd best watch out for those little girls," Galra said to him before taking up her stride once more. "They'll slit your throat and steal your purse before you can pinch one of their plump, rosy cheeks."

She was off again before he could ask if it was true of many Gerudo girls, or of those ones in particular. He just trotted a little closer to the group, falling into Palo's tall shadow. When they stepped from the market street out into the city center, the din quieted down. The oasis, perhaps once as unremarkable and natural as the occasional pool the army had passed on its way to the city, was ringed with white and blue tile, statues and shady palms, benches and shallow recesses where the town's residents could draw water. A few women, half-naked and laughing, filled their jugs, skirts and trousers hiked up to their thighs. It was certainly a much more attractive water source than the small, grimy wells that dotted the Capital's infinite streets.

Link was about to ask Galra about the sky-blue water, but Talm had already apparently thought to interrogate her regarding other subjects.

"I didn't know you were Ahnadib's daughter," she said, sidling up to the dancer as they passed the oasis.

"The one and only. She kept popping out sons until she finally had me. The miracle daughter. I can hardly count my brothers, there are so many."

"Where are they?"

"Oh, here and there. Most of them are in the Obra Garud militia, as captains and fighters. Some work finding and collecting wormsilk. One oversees a silk processing plant in the Capital. He keeps taunting me by sending letters saying he knows this and that important dancer at the Opera, and he'll put in a good word on my behalf." She laughed. "But he's so ugly—as if any performer would even _talk_ to him."

Talm laughed with her, and they fell into an animated discussion on the topic of dance. Link's questions about the oasis drifted away on the wind as the city's central square shrank behind them and disappeared entirely when they rounded a corner.

The buildings started to change—instead of intricate wood awnings and thin, silk-festooned houses, the structures widened, thickened, grew taller—soon the buildings were so grand only one or two could fit on each block. Stone towers thinned toward the sky, deep, golden peals rang from belfries, the sound of chanting floated from tall windows, the smoke of incense and burnt sage drifted down the street—the bustle of daily life was gone, making way for the austerity and slowness of ritual.

"Where is this Nabru again?" Impa asked, interrupting Galra and Talm's conversation.

"She's at Molgera's temple." Galra's face fell for a moment. "She may come out, she may not. She still has a few days of vigil."

"Which one is Molgera's?" Palo asked, folding his hands behind his head as he walked. "There are more temples than gods in all Hyrule, it seems."

"You could say that. Din has more than one here—she seems to be favored among the triumvirate. Even Hylia has one, but only foreigners go to her ceremonies. Mostly people divide their worship between smaller gods, depending on whether or not someone's traveling, or having a baby, or dying or falling in love," she nudged him playfully. "There's a god for every occasion, you know?"

Palo shrugged. "I suppose."

"And then there's Molgera. She has the oldest cult I know of, but not just anyone can join, not like the others. You have to show dedication. And endurance." She stopped before a shallow fence, made of sandstone and lined with small carvings. She looked back at the four of them before opening a thin gate wrought of white iron. "You all can come into the courtyard, but you two—" she pointed to Link and Palo—"can't go any farther."

They turned to one another briefly as Galra led them through the gate into the small, tiled quadrangle before the intricate face of the temple. A few women in white robes lounged on the plain benches in the courtyard, walked along the shadows of the cloisters, talked with one another in quiet voices. They all turned as Galra strode toward the temple, companions in tow.

The building's facade, comprised of dark grey stone, stretched to the sky. Carvings of armored sandworms glinted on its face, swarming around windows and twisting between pillars. Round, toothy mouths protruded from the images, the smaller worms latching like lampreys onto the back of the largest. The length of the greatest creature circled the facade several times, twisting over long windows, and finally terminated in a massive, symmetrical mouth above the temple door. From the wide, double jaws of the mouth emerged the graven image of a woman, perhaps a daughter of the worm or the personification of it—Link wasn't sure and didn't have time to ask. He'd barely taken his fill of the facade when two acolytes, white-robed, red hair cut short, strode up to them and started speaking simultaneously.

"Only women allowed in the temple," they said in so many different words, as Galra led her companions toward the doors.

"Of course," she answered, motioning for Link and Palo to kindly wait outside. Impa made to follow, but one of the girls prodded her shoulder, holding her back. With a skip of his heart and a flush of embarrassment, he realized they doubted her.

Impa came to the same realization, and perhaps regretting her practical but unflattering choice of wardrobe, scowled. "I _am_ a woman, you idiots," she said. Even Link had to admit that if he watched her from behind, her short hair and wide pants would indicate nothing about her sex.

One of the girls smiled slyly. "You sure as hell don't look like one." Galra, wide-eyed, turned to watch them accost her companion. The acolyte's eyes wandered to Link, amused. " _Him_ , on the other hand…"

The second girl chuckled. "Yes, but if you let a pretty thing like him inside, there's no guarantee he'll come back with his dignity intact." They both fell into laughter so loud it shook the courtyard. They seemed remarkably impious for devotees of a goddess, but perhaps they only struck Link as such because he'd only seen the nuns of Hylian goddesses, modest and devout, silent and polite. He'd never minded interacting with them during his time in the Capital—they spoke just about as much as he had, and they certainly didn't joke.

"Enough," Galra barked, and the girls' laughter died down. "We're here to see Nabru."

Their eyes widened, and one of them started running her fingers through her short hair nervously. "Nabru's busy."

"I know. Take me to her. It's important." Galra's frown forced the girls to turn, and folding their hands, they headed toward the temple entrance in silence. Galra followed, Talm behind her. Impa, perhaps unsure if she'd secured permission to pass, or perhaps because she did not care, chose to stay behind with Link and Palo. As the women entered the mouth of the ancient temple, she crossed her arms and leaned against the stone wall of the courtyard, looking at her feet.

Link wasn't sure if he should say anything to her, so he just stood beside her and joined her in staring at her tabi-clad feet. Palo was the only one who seemed willing to speak.

"I see you've got your harp but not your sword. Why aren't you bringing Bloodletter with you?" he asked. Although a nondescript short sword hung at her hip, Link noticed the large blade she'd carried on her back across Hyrule remained suspiciously absent.

"Because, if the royal army marches on Obra Garud, my father will need it there with him."

Link, eager to jump on a topic of conversation that was not about Impa's apparent failure to live up to the beauty standards of the cult of a giant worm, decided to ask her about the sword. "What's Bloodletter's story? Is it a…" He searched for the right word, thinking back to the extensive vocabulary Impa and her family had stuffed down his throat during the winter. "Is it an heirloom?"

Impa leaned keenly toward him, smiling a little. "Yes—well, sort of. That sword and my father's staff, Bonesetter, are part of a matched set. They were my grandparents', and they had intended to pass them down to their sons. But my uncle died during the Eldin War, so my father ended up with both. He had a firstborn to pass one of them to, so I got Bloodletter."

"After all, he wasn't going to give up his beloved staff," Palo said. "It didn't help that Mardon came down from the mountain and said his daughter was going to grow up to be a great warrior."

Link narrowed his eyes. "Mardon?"

Impa flushed and fell silent, so Palo took up the conversation. "The younger brother of the Goron patriarch." Link remembered Impa telling him she'd once met one of those strange people, though she was too young to remember it. "He came down to pay his respects to Talporom, saw he had a newly-born child, and blessed her on the spot. Come to think of it, Impa really had no choice in the matter, when it came to her tattoos. She was a warrior from the time she was born."

"It's not like you had a choice, either," she said quietly.

Palo's smile faded a little. "The choice seems an illusion to me."

"What choice?" Link asked.

"In their eighteenth year, a Sheikah will receive their tattoos, designating their role in the tribe," Impa started.

"You're supposed to have a choice in it—some people, like Talm, fully buy into it," Palo continued. "She knew what her tattoos would be when she was a child. But she thought it was of her own volition. Some, like Impa and me, just accept the way it is. Impa was blessed by a Goron leader—of _course_ the whole village would assume she would grow to be a warrior. Me, on the other hand… well, my fate was sealed the first time I complained of seeing strangers around the graveyard." Palo laughed bitterly.

Link thought of all the tribal roles with which he was familiar. There were dozens, perhaps even hundreds, but he'd only seen as many tattoos as he'd met Sheikah, and there weren't many left. "Well, what did you _want_ to be? A healer, like Talporom?" Link asked.

Impa and Palo looked at one another, almost confused. Her lips pursed a little. "I suppose I've never given it much thought."

Palo shrugged. "There was, and still is, little point in speculating. We are what we are. There's no use regretting what we're not."

A slight commotion from the mouth of the temple brought Link's attention to the far side of the courtyard. A crowd of acolytes spilled out in a messy flow of white robes, and after them trotted Galra and Talm. Link tried to read their faces, watch their stances for any sign of success or failure. He didn't have to look long, since shortly after the two exited the temple, out came a magnificent woman Link could only assume was the infamous Nabru.

She was of greater stature than any woman he'd ever seen—on par with General Haema, at least—the only person Link could think of who was taller was the King himself. She dwarfed the women around her; she almost had to duck through the large doorway to the temple. Her red hair fell in a long braid across her muscled shoulder and down her loose, white robes. A pair of large, intelligent eyes shone from above her hooked nose, and a slight smirk crossed her lips. The scent of oils and incense clung to her, filling the courtyard as she emerged.

She narrowed her eyes, scanning the cloister, until they settled on the three strangers leaning against the wall. She smiled, and with a few long strides of her bare legs, approached them, laying her hands on her hips and towering over each.

"These are the people who have interrupted my vigil?" she asked. Her voice was deep, as one might expect from a person that large, but there was still a softness, a humor to it, that told Link she wasn't entirely infuriated with cutting her religious devotions short. "I suppose if it's as important as Galra tells me, I've no choice."

The woman in question stood beside Nabru, the top of her head barely approaching the giant's shoulders. "Nabru," the dancer started, motioning to Link and his companions. "These are Link, Impa, and Palo—"

"You're the deadseer?" she bent to Palo, narrowing her eyes at him. He raised an eyebrow in response, but Link could see him lean back slightly, adjusting his footing as the woman loomed over him almost threateningly. When Nabru had her fill of him, she crossed her arms and retreated, smiling. "Are you prepared to face the desert?" she asked.

Palo nodded, the others following suit.

"Well, you're more prepared than me. I still have to wash all this perfume off, or I'll attract every sandworm in the land." She waved her hand. "Give me an hour. I'll meet you at the western gate. Bring lots of water and fast horses—unless you want to get swallowed." She gave them a wry smile and turned from them, white robes blowing in the wind, and disappeared beyond the cloister's gate.

Link looked at Palo, who still seemed to be recovering from the invasion of his personal space. He waited a moment, seemingly clearing his head, before he crossed his arms and smiled. "I like her."

* * *

Link stood at the city's western entrance, still shut tight against any of the King's forces that might seek to enter, and loitered. Galra had convinced the watchtower's guards to let them through, if only because it was well known at that point the King's army had few intentions of marching on the city anytime soon. Link did not know how many citizens of Obra Garud had knowledge of the King's trek into the desert, but his camp had been still and quiet for so many days, the townsfolk found it easy to forget about the imminent threat, so far away on the other side of those tall walls.

Half an hour into the wait, the horses started to fidget, snorting and stomping in anticipation. Link lay his hand on one of their necks, wishing fervently for Epona's company. These native horses could sense they were heading west, and feared it—but he knew the fire-red warhorse would stare the wilderness in the face with no hesitation. He lay his forehead against his horse's cheek, comforting it, although he was just as anxious for the ride out.

Galra said that since the King took camels, he intended to go what she referred to as "the long way around"—avoiding the dark sands of Wormhaven and the haunted part of the Haunted Waste. If they wanted to beat him to wherever he was going (Ahnadib hypothesized it was a long-abandoned temple in the far reaches of the Waste, since there were no other landmarks within a hundred miles), they would have to pass directly through Wormhaven. When they reached the other side of that dangerous stretch of worm-infested land, they would come to a small oasis where their horses could drink and they could refill their canteens. Beyond that, the roaring winds of the sandstorms would obscure their sight, and they would have to rely on Palo to find them a guide among the corpses who had met their ends in the wasteland.

Link could not say he looked forward to the trip. But when Nabru appeared at the end of the road, waving excitedly, her large frame adorned in leather padding, red pants flared wide, his heart slowed a little, and some relief flowed through him. The way she smiled almost mischievously, the way she sauntered casually up to them, the way her large, black horse followed her with no concern for the future, eased a little of his anxiety. He knew a human could falsify her true feelings by changing her expressions or voice, but a horse could not lie. If that animal was comfortable in Nabru's presence, despite the anxiety emanating from all others around it, Link knew he could trust this weird, giant woman.

Nabru greeted them heartily, spreading her arms and giving them what Link might've guessed to be some sort of obscene salute. She approached them, calling up to the women on the watchtower in Gerudo. The red-haired heads at the top of the tower disappeared, and a few moments later, the gates to the west opened with a metallic creak. Link watched the doors shine in the harsh sunlight, and mounted his horse. He patted its neck reassuringly before nudging it into a trot, out the gates and after Nabru.

At first, it was silent, almost pleasant going. They did not push their horses too hard in the heat, and by the time the sun set ahead of them, they still had a few miles to go before they had to worry about the hungry inhabitants of Wormhaven.

"When we get to the place where the sands turn dark, and start to move on their own, like water, then you follow me closely," Nabru told them, dismounting as they stopped for the night. "You stray from me, you'll get yourself nice and swallowed." She smiled, almost as if pleased with the thought.

Impa seated herself on the sand, removing the wrap of cloth she'd worn over her head as protection against the sun. She shook sand from it, futilely, and sighed. "How long do we spend in Wormhaven?" she asked.

"If you keep up a nice gallop, not long. Seems like an eternity, though, especially if you have one or two of Molgera's children following you." Nabru searched through her small pack and pulled out some dried meat, which she dined on thoughtfully. "But you're safe with me. I know my way around them."

"If you don't mind me asking—" Impa attempted to start.

"I don't."

"How are you familiar with such a place? Are you in the wormsilk trade?"

"No. Even those who hunt down and collect wormsilk don't wander too far into Wormhaven—it's a good way to get your workers killed and your stock destroyed." Nabru stuffed another strip of meat into her mouth. "I found myself in Molgera's wilderness wholly by accident. Accident, or fate, you choose; I don't care. I was in a little trouble with the law, you see—if you can call it 'law' that rules over here. Took my chances in the desert as opposed to the Obra Garud council. The desert spared me where they vowed they would not. I returned a changed woman—I pay my respects to the right people now; the great Worm rather than the authorities." She chuckled. "Still, they tolerate me. I do my work for Ahnadib and Ahnadib pays the council, so I'm a free woman."

"Exactly what is it you do for Ahnadib?"

"Well, originally I was hired to protect some of her silk caravans as they made their way from Obra Garud to Onrago. For a while I was Galra's bodyguard. Whenever she needs anyone killed, I'll do it for her." Nabru laughed, finishing her meal. "Not that she needs very many people killed. Just impolite suitors, and the like."

A bead of sweat made its way down Link's cheek, and he swallowed audibly. It did seem as if Nabru had the power to crack his neck with one hearty wring of her hands—he imagined the people who must've found themselves on her bad side, begging for mercy before she cracked them in half over her knee.

"Did Galra inform you as to the true nature of what we're doing out here?" Impa asked her.

"Oh, she did. She knows me well—she seems to think my hatred of Ganond's ilk surpasses my devotion to my matron godhead. I realize now that destroying one is serving the other."

"How so?"

Nabru chewed, thinking for a few seconds. "Listen well, Sheikah. The desert is wild and endless. The notion of conquering it leaves a sour taste in any Gerudo's mouth. Especially by a Hyrulean-bred man such as Ganondorf. If he gets his way, there will be no wild worms left, no reaches of wilderness left untamed." The looks on the others' faces must've told her they did not quite understand—not entirely. "Though there are certainly more than a few of my people who would once again welcome the rule of a King, that is not true for most of us. Many of my people harbor a lingering resentment toward Ganond, especially this deep in the desert. He might be mostly a legend after so many years, but the sting of his betrayal is fresh enough to us. He was our King. We gave him everything a King could want. And the bastard leaves us, for nothing but the promise of a better land. He abandons us back when times were hard, back when the winds wore away at our walls and Obra Garud was nothing more than a thieves' fortress. But then we finally change our habits from stealing to selling—we find silk, we find buyers, we get rich—and now his descendant wants to come back and force us into his kingdom? No, we will not bend the knee to a monarchy who abandoned its people in their time of need, only to return to grasp at the spoils of their hard work."

Palo smiled. "If all the citizens of Obra Garud are like you, they've nothing to worry about from the King's troops."

Nabru shook her head, unwinding her braid and letting her dark hair fall across her wide shoulders. "Unfortunately, many do not care for these things. As long as they have food and water, as long as they have coin and pleasure and wine, they do not care who rules them. Most would not notice if the angry spirit of Ganond himself came back and overthrew the council of the city." She unbuckled her leather plates, laying it beside her on a small mat she'd opened across the white sand. The moon lit up her hair like long streaks of flame, and she shook it out before reclining on her bedroll. "My people have always been fiercely independent. But what we don't like to admit is that we need Hyrule. I've been along my fair share of trade routes, and I can tell you, it's our close alliance with your land that keeps us as happy as we are." She folded her hands behind her head. "When Ganond left and we allied ourselves with Hyrule—when we could come and go freely from your land to ours—that was the best thing that happened to my people. I love my homeland, but as you can see, it is harsh and unyielding. We need Hyrule—we need the things you provide in exchange for our gold and silk and whatnot. We do not want to go back to the old days of hostility, when we were nothing more than scavengers and thieves. And you don't want us to, either, believe me." She eyed them with something of a humorous menace. "Ahnadib says you're planning on reinstating the old royal family, but she also says that we will not lose the friendship that the Conqueror King's reign forged between us." Nabru paused for a moment, smiling, perhaps stifling a laugh. "I'm perfectly content with deposing your King, as long as Hyrule keeps supplying us with good food. You know how hard it is to shit on a fig-only diet?"

When she let loose a hearty chuckle, they laughed along with her. Some of Link's anxiety left with his voice, out into the desert night. Even Impa seemed charmed at Nabru's humorous vulgarity. As she pulled out her bedroll, attempting to shake the sand from it, Nabru lifted her head a little.

"The desert gets cold at night. You might want to sleep closer together."

She shrugged when they politely dismissed her suggestion—after all, the lingering heat from the afternoon still hung heavy around them. But sometime during the night, each one of them found him or herself shivering, teeth-chattering and wishing for merciful warmth. By the time day arrived, announcing their departure for Wormhaven, they had all unconsciously piled together like puppies in the stable, shivering in one another's arms.

When Link awoke to find his companions limb-locked and snoring slightly, heads on stomachs and arms wrapped round one another in protective subconsciousness, he snuggled in closer to Impa's shoulder, and let a smile cross his lips. In the warm company of his companions, he knew he could face the long ride through Wormhaven, face whatever lay beyond. He might be a coward, he might tremble in terror at sights the others might scoff at, he might be faint of heart and slow of mind, but he would keep up, he would do his best.

 _If I am a coward, I will be the bravest coward in the land_ , he thought. _It is true what Palo says_. _I am what I am. No use regretting what I'm not._


	32. Molgera's Domain

Hey everyone! Just wanted to thank all y'all for reading and leaving feedback, and thanks to those who've followed and favorited. Increasingly I've been able to do a chapter in the span of something like a week or two, so I was thinking that I'd start updating every second Tuesday (unless otherwise specified; I might try for weekly if I manage to get a few chapters ahead!). It also helps motivate me to write if I give myself something like a deadline. As usual, thanks so much to everyone for sticking with the story!

* * *

"Architecture in the Gerudo territories is well known for its traditional roots as prisons and fortresses. While most of these buildings have since been repurposed for regular use, many small jails, scattered about the cities of the desert, still function as holding cells. Curiously, the most common reason to be thrown into one of these cells is for a crime the Gerudo had sanctioned as their livelihood for hundreds of years: thievery. For if there is something robbers hate most in the world, it is being robbed themselves."

Wenstan Illar, "Practicality and Historical Monuments"

* * *

Wormhaven spread before them, sand glowing darkly under the rising sun. The dunes were long and round, uniformly shaped, and each mound seemed to span a length beyond Link's vision. He squinted at their distant, cross-hatched configuration and saw such deliberation in their shapes he realized no wind could have sculpted them.

"Worm tracks," Nabru muttered, watching his eyes widen at the sight of the valley of dark sand before them. "They come here to spawn. Well," she smiled, " _one_ comes here to spawn."

"One?" Link asked.

"There is only one Worm," Nabru answered. "And She is eternal." The woman nudged her horse down the slope of the large dune on which they stood, toward the expanse of Wormhaven. "The idea is," she called over her shoulder at the others, "to get through here as quickly as possible. But remember, even the smallest worm is faster than the average horse."

Link suddenly wished that he had managed to take Epona in his escape from the King's camp. Although the desert-bred steeds Galra had given them were swift and tireless, he still longed for the familiar shape of the warhorse between his knees, the comforting scent of her, the way she keenly obeyed his commands seemingly before he even gave them. As he nudged his current horse down the side of the dune, into the valley of black sand, he prayed for them both.

He glanced over his shoulder to see the Sheikah follow. Like him, they had wrapped strips of brown cloth around their faces to keep out the sand—so he could not see if any fear colored their features. He gulped, and decided to be thankful that they, in turn, could not see the terror that haunted his frown. Giving them a reassuring gesture, he turned his attention from them and focused on keeping up with Nabru.

Her horse seemed proportional to her figure—long-legged, heavily muscular, and as she pushed it into a more intense gallop, Link doubted his steed would keep up with hers. But the horse under him, perhaps out of fearful familiarity with the dangerous terrain, flew across the sand, dust billowing in the wake of its thundering hooves.

Link did not know how many hours he rode, accompanied only by the sounds of his and his mount's haggard breathing, the thump of his heart beating in time with the panicked hoofbeats. When a wide, deafening noise billowed around him like a wind, it was so close, so encompassing, he thought it must've come from somewhere inside him. It wasn't until Nabru urged her galloping horse closer to his and called out he realized the sound had been the shifting of sand—mountains of it, moving like water around him.

He turned his head to see a shaft of black burst from the sand beside him. Larger around than the oldest trees in Eldin, the worm emerged from the ground as a fish from water, creaking and rumbling like the earth it sprang from. It twisted beside him, round mouth opening wide in the air, and he caught a glimpse of a row of gray teeth. Its armored segments shone in the harsh sunlight before it dove back to the sand, black plates arcing over the ground as its long tail followed its head. Its open mouth crashed into the sand with a deafening crunch, impact sending waves through the ground like liquid. Link's horse reared for a moment, letting loose a disheartening screech, before pivoting itself away from the worm. Link did not fight the animal as it galloped away from the suspended length of seemingly endless black body, but merely turned his head to see the tail emerge from the sand and soar along the sky. When the tail finally disappeared into the soft earth, the deafening gale of sound had reduced to a slow rumble.

Suddenly Nabru was beside him, motioning at him, shouting above the wind and the beat of horses' hooves. "Stay with me!" She looked behind her, to make sure all followed. She urged her horse to the right, toward the hilly ripples where the worm had disappeared, and the animal obeyed. Link followed her, heart thumping in his ears, trying to ignore the harrowing sound of earth shifting below him. He decided to trust Nabru as her horse trusted her, and followed in her tracks faithfully and quickly. When the worm burst from the sand once more, jawless mouth open wide, it passed over him like a massive, squirming bridge, overshooting the company of horses and disappearing into the dark sand, unfed. When it emerged again, hungry, Nabru led them away from its trajectory, circumventing the waves of sand that poured from the force of its movement. She seemed to know where the worm would appear and where it would land, and made sure to gallop somewhere between those two points—more than once Link found himself in the dusty shadow of the giant worm, narrowing his eyes against the torrent of sand that poured from its belly.

A second worm, too small to swallow a horse but big enough to wound one, burst from the ground, squirming and slithering like an angry snake. Nabru seemed to concern herself with the larger one, so Link rotated himself in the saddle to keep an eye on their new stalker. The smaller worm, round-mouthed and hungry, screeched as it squirmed after them, long, alien tongue unfolding, probing the air for their scent.

When the creature's eyeless, dark face struck out toward Impa's horse, tongue brushing against its tail, Link turned himself in his saddle and fumbled for his bow. He had never shot from horseback before, but he managed to nock an arrow, hands shaking, as Impa's mount bolted in panic. He saw her struggle to bring the horse back under control, attempting to steer it away from the small worm and into the shadow of the large one. The creature slithered after her, screeching, and Link drew his bowstring.

Suddenly Nabru was beside him, red braid whipping in the wind. In the chaos of the horses' movement, in the thick clouds of dust and the sand churning like waves around him, he saw her huge hand reach out, impossibly fast, impossibly precise. She snatched the arrow from his bow before he had time to release the string, and, after giving him the most poisonous look he'd received since he'd last seen Haema, snapped it in her fist like a dry twig.

She shook her head and steered her horse toward Impa's. The Sheikah turned her covered head and urged her horse sharply to the right, letting Nabru drift between her and the small worm. The creature changed its target, teeth shining in the dusty light, launching itself out of the sand toward the Gerudo giant.

Then it was gone. Both worms disappeared back into the ground with sudden deliberation, leaving nothing but clouds of dust. Nabru turned in her saddle to make sure all were present, and slowed her horse. Panting and snorting, the animal seemed grateful for the reprieve, but it did not last long. Nabru's wide brown ears perked up, and a deep, uncanny rumble coursed through the earth beneath them. Link's horse fidgeted nervously, flicking its tail, and he gulped.

The rumbling grew louder, and with a fierce shout, Nabru kicked her horse into a gallop. It flew across the sand, and Link's mount wasted no time following suit. The great, terrifying shaking grew louder, and Link could feel the earth move even through the frantic gallop of his horse. Ahead of him, Nabru shouted something incomprehensible, and he saw her reach back and wrap her hand around the spear that lay across her saddle. Link tightened his grip on the reins and leaned forward, urging his horse onward, away from the terrible rumbling. For a moment, the earth fell quiet, and he knew Nabru had led him out of danger—he let himself take a breath, and sighed, before a deafening boom echoed around him.

What burst from the sand behind him was far bigger than the worm he had assumed they'd outrun. Its black body, armored and sharp, twisted in segments above him, wide and long as a river. The length of it came between him and the sun, and he could see the shadow of a mouth at its front, large-lipped, pincer-like jaws opening in the air. The length of its tongue spanned dozens of feet, the flexible cups of its maw opening wider than the gates to Obra Garud itself. Feelers wiggled inside the red cavern of its mouth, prodding at the clouds, as it curved its impossibly large body against the setting sun. It did not take Link more than a second to realize in whose presence he rode. As he lifted his eyes to the giant worm, he knew this magnificent creature couldn't be any other than the ancient deity, the mother worm, Molgera.

Nabru lifted her spear above her head, red hair flying behind her; she carried her body proudly atop her horse, letting loose a piercing shriek of joy. Perhaps for the first time, perhaps not, she met her matron god.

The great worm, seemingly uninterested in a meal so small and unsatisfying as Link and his companions, soared above them, turning against the sky in a magnificent length of shining armor and rigid bristles. She glinted in the sun, a long, terrible shadow, and for a moment Link could believe the worm really was eternal.

Through the joyful ululations of Nabru, the haze of sandy wind, Link watched the worm curl in the dust clouds, long, blue-tipped tongue probing the air, mouth opening and closing over the blurred shape of the distant sun. She bent impossibly high, turning her face down to the ground, retracting her tongue before diving to the sand. When the sloped head met the earth, a resounding boom nearly shook Link off the back of his horse.

His heart danced somewhere in his throat, his lungs struggled to draw breath, he blinked and teared up against the wave of sandy wind that radiated from the impact. His horse shook its head and snorted, hooves pounding, swerving, but it stayed in the shadow of the worm, in the tracks of Nabru.

Slowly, loudly, Molgera slithered back into the earth, huge armored segments undulating into the sand with mighty sprays of dust. The waves of pressure threatened to throw Link from his horse, but he held fast as the length of the great worm rumbled into the sand. He grit his teeth, narrowed his eyes against the wind, and leaned forward, gripping the reins tightly. The ground shook so mightily he was unsure where the horse's hooves ended and the sand began, he wasn't sure if the worm had ripped the ground apart with the force of her dive.

The din, the fury of the squirming god, seemed to last a lifetime. But after what must've only been a few long seconds, the last segments of the giant worm retreated into the sand. The intense shaking of the earth lessened into a fervent rumbling, and in Link's blurred vision, the ground stilled. When the dust and sand clouds cleared, when he could tell the earth from the sky again, they had reached the edge of Wormhaven.

After the sand lightened and the earth solidified, Nabru pulled the reins and her horse came to a stop, panting furiously. She turned and looked back over Wormhaven, the dark sand glinting in the setting sun, and slid off her mare. The others, with relieved sighs of varying magnitude, followed suit. Link was thankful to have his feet touch solid ground once more, and even though the rocky sand still shifted under his boots, it did not have the same fluidic instability as the dark dunes he had just escaped. He reveled in the firmness of the earth beneath him for a few moments, before he was suddenly and unexpectedly displaced from it.

Nabru bunched the loose fabric of his collar in one giant fist and shoved him with such force he staggered across the sand, barely catching his balance with his back foot. Her eyes flashed furiously, and her mouth contorted in a grimace as she prodded his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Impa step forward, as if to defend him, but thought better of it when Nabru eschewed physically harming him in favor of shouting in his face.

"That was my matron deity's child you were about to poke full of holes," she barked. Link gulped, straightening himself back up. "You're lucky Molgera granted us passage, even after you almost shot my spiritual sister."

Link stared at her for a moment, thinking of the toothy, round mouth that had slithered after Impa and nearly latched onto her horse, and dared to consider refusing to apologize. He bit his lip, trying to compose an explanation in his head, about how he couldn't just sit back and watch Impa get hurt, but he had been out of practice speaking for so long he could barely get out an incomprehensible stutter.

Fortunately, Nabru's anger couldn't obstruct her joy for long—after a few seconds of staring deep into Link's face, a wide smile appeared on her thick lips. Something of a suppressed laugh escaped her, and she clapped Link on the back so hard his breath left him in one distressing wheeze. "But gods damn, was that not _magnificent_?" she asked.

Link nodded, half in agreement, half in complaisance. He slumped in relief when Nabru finally turned his attention from him, unconcerned with threatening him further. She trotted back to her panting, exhausted mount and focused on unsaddling it. She stroked the creature's black cheek with a large, loving hand, and cooed words of sympathy and praise into its ear. Link could tell by the way the horse flicked its facial muscles that it understood her. It almost seemed proud to have served her so well.

Link's animal, sadly, was a different story. It trembled, still fraught with distress at what it had encountered in Wormhaven. As the others dismounted, congratulating one another on a successful, if not terrifying, ride, and waxing poetic about the size and grandeur of Molgera, Link tried to calm his horse with gentle touches. By the time he'd managed to convince it through soft strokes and encouraging words that it was no longer in danger, Palo had already unpacked their dried supper. Nabru knelt at the edge of their little encampment, forehead pressed to the sand, muttering fervent, thankful prayers in the direction of Wormhaven. Her voice was low, guttural, colored with the flairs and throaty lulls of the Gerudo language.

Link sat down opposite Palo as the last rays of sunlight dissolved into the deep blue of night, and rubbed the chill out of his hands. He briefly thought of how he'd like a fire, but realized they had nothing with which to start it. It surprised him how quickly the desert could swing from sweltering heat to bitter cold. It was not as bad as the darkest days of Eldine winter, but he could not help himself from scooting closer to his companions as the stars brightened above them.

Impa removed her long cloak of gray cloth, pulling out her small lyre and laying it across her lap. Nabru, now finished with her prayers, glanced at the instrument curiously, smiling as she brought a strip of dried meat to her mouth. "Are you going to play us a song?" she asked.

"Yes. But you probably won't recognize it as one," Impa replied, and readied her fingers on the strings. She took a breath and plucked, and a deep, unearthly sound rumbled from the lower strings, trembling through the air like an unintelligible word. Link closed his eyes against the forceful sound, but with that wave of dense noise came a comforting warmth, a resonant heat that banished the chill from his bones, and stayed long after the sound ended.

Impa lowered her lyre. "I thought I'd save us the trouble of sleeping piled like animals in the night," she said.

"Concerned for our dignity, as always," Talm said, but Link could see her body relax in the merciful heat.

"It won't last long, so we'd best try to get to sleep before it fades."

Nabru seemed smitten with, but unsurprised by, the strange magic still emanating from the silent harp. "I'll be damned," she said. "Looks like you Sheikah have some witchcraft in your blood after all."

Palo shrugged. "Only a few kinds. Healing and shield magic." Nabru gave him a curious look, and he continued. "Disguise, protection, illusion, things like that."

"Ah. We have our own illusionists over here. Probably of a different breed, though." She motioned for Impa to give her the harp, and a little hesitantly, she complied. "I was taught all magic comes from the desert."

"It could be true," Palo said, as Nabru took the instrument in her lap. "Who's to say it didn't begin here, and wander into other lands, into other bloodlines?"

Nabru shrugged, and plucked a few strings. She frowned when her earnest strums generated only silence. "Never had it in me, anyway."

As she handed the harp back to its rightful owner, Link could not help but recall the King's monologues; how he had expatiated on the thaumaturgical properties of the desert wind, how he had regarded the wild magic in the air with envious reverence. The strolls they took had seemed like rituals, rife with portent. Even now he swore he could still hear the echoes of the King's voice, still smell the faint air of black magic, still feel the freezing wind on his neck. Even the encompassing heat of Impa's music could not stop the chill from running up his spine.

"So, that Wormhaven is a hell of a place," Palo said, finishing his meal. "Can't say I've been anywhere like it."

"Not many can," Nabru said. "And fewer can survive to tell others about it." She winked at them, as if congratulating them on their successful ascension to some lauded status among the Gerudo. She pointed at Impa and Talm. "You two are now qualified to be acolytes in the temple." Her finger wandered to Link and Palo before retracting, almost disappointedly. "You, not entirely. It's a very traditional religion."

Palo smiled. "Surely you can't deny I would look fantastic in those white robes."

Nabru threw her head back and laughed. "You're asking the wrong woman. I suppose if you grew your hair long and applied enough paint to your face, you'd make a… striking girl. Your Hylian friend would have an easier time, though." Nabru shook her head, broad smile widening. "If ever I see you wandering the halls of the temple, I promise not to say a word. You have survived Wormhaven just as any woman could. I am of the rare opinion that Molgera does not judge the sex of those who show her the proper respect."

"As it should be," Talm said. Link could almost sense an indignant tone in her voice—and by the way Impa whipped her head to glare at her, she could hear it as well. He knew if Talm offended Nabru in some way, there were bound to be broken bones.

But Nabru met the small challenge with nothing more combative than a glint in her narrowed eye. "That is true. We still have a long way to go in that respect, but in my grandmother's generation, things were worse. We have come far. We no longer abandon our baby boys to the mercy of the climes and the gods. We keep them in our homes, raise them like daughters, against the oldest traditions."

"But you still don't consider them full-blooded," Talm continued.

Impa swallowed audibly. "Forgive her, Nabru. She's just very fond of men. In general."

The Gerudo's smile did not fade; it was patient, secure. It was the grin of a person who knew her power, her beliefs, were not to be shaken. It reminded Link of the King's rare, but wide, smile. "Tell me of your southern provinces, you Hyruleans, and the station of women in those parts. They flee their homes, flee being relegated to a life of domestic servitude. Maids from Relta, Treefall—villages across Faron and Ordona, even sometimes the Capital—arrive in Onrago with dreams and aspirations. Budding warriors, scholars, painters, singers, businesswomen, poets and politicians—all fleeing their own families for a taste of freedom. True, we may have a quirk or two when it comes to gender, but we let our men do what they want. We do not silence them, we do not lock them in a home and tell them their only worth is in parenthood, we do not tell them they cannot pursue their wants because they had the misfortune of having been born male." When Talm opened her mouth to retort, Impa's elbow met her ribs. Nabru closed her eyes, reaching back to unbraid her hair. "In this land, everyone has the freedom to pursue their desires, should they possess the strength. It is not like your cities, where the factories own the people and the rich and noble walk all over everyone else, or the southern reaches of your land, where the women are told to be quiet and bear children." Her scowl softened a little. "You, Talm of the Sheikah, are lucky to have been born into a tradition that allows you to choose your path."

"That was our mother's gift to us," Impa said, before her sister could continue. "She left Faron to escape a marriage she did not consent to."

"It is a common story," Nabru said.

Link thought for a moment. "So what is yours?"

"My story?" Nabru seemed taken aback. When he nodded solemnly, she shrugged. "It's a common one, too, around these parts. I was born in Obra Garud goddess knows how long ago. Grew up pilfering my sustenance—I wasn't good, I wasn't sneaky, but I was damn strong for a child, so I lived as well as any other. The first time I was thrown in prison I escaped, so the second time they sent me to the penitentiary on the north side of Wormhaven. I threw a few guards off a watchtower and went on my merry way." Her hair, unbraided, fell across her shoulder and she stroked it smooth. She smiled as if recalling something particularly pleasant. "I walked across Wormhaven back to Obra Garud, and found myself on the way. When I got back to the city, I was a woman who had been blessed by the Worm Eternal. I had nothing to fear from the laws and punishments of civilization." She unpacked her bedroll and lay herself down on it, fiddling with the buckles on her leather armor. "Either through luck or by the divine will of Molgera herself, they did not imprison me a third time. The council had heard rumors of my return, but after I was declared an apostle of Molgera, they could not touch me." She removed her pauldrons and stretched out her arms. "But, blessed as I was, I still had to eat. I joined a fighting pit and won my meals that way. That's where Ahnadib found me."

"What was Ahnadib doing at a fighting pit?" Impa asked, almost incredulously.

"Looking for a bodyguard," Nabru answered. She lay down her head. "She knows the city—she knows where to find the toughest fighters, the loyalest captains, the richest patrons, the hardest workers…" She clasped her hands behind her head and stared at the stars. "If anyone can keep Obra Garud out of the hands of Ganondorf, it's her."

Impa lowered herself to the ground, relaxing in the radiant heat her music had instilled in the air. "I would've said the same thing about Onrago."

Nabru sighed slowly. She seemed to think for a moment, a solemnness overtaking her, and closed her eyes. "Me too." She rested in pained silence for a few seconds. "But I still have faith in her. If she can trust me despite all my flaws and failings, I should trust her despite hers."

"She's the best chance we've got," Palo admitted.

"And she thinks the same of you," Nabru replied. "That's why she sent you out here, to the edge of the world. She knows whatever it is the Hyrulean King seeks in the desert, you will manage to find it first."

"How exactly do you propose we go around looking for it?" Talm asked. "I'm sure you of all people know this place is massive."

"Massive, but empty. There are few oases in the wasteland. We will not have to search many." Nabru glanced up to Palo. "Besides, we will have a guide. Tomorrow, we will approach the edge of the Haunted Waste, where our deadseer will do his work. Beyond that, I cannot say what we will find."

It was Nabru's surety that had kept Link optimistic about their expedition into the wasteland; when she turned over and closed her eyes, he felt his courage falter without her guidance, and his heart sent itself into a frantic flutter. He swallowed, watching his other companions drift into sleep and silence, and reached into his breast pocket.

Sighing, he pulled out the familiar triangular charm. He held it in his palm, running a finger along its edge before clutching it close. It embarrassed him how often he had to consult it like an oracle, but when he tucked it back into his pocket, his heart had slowed, his mind relaxed.

Even if he had to rely on a small wooden charm to help him sleep, he didn't mind. Warmed by the faint echoes of Impa's harp, he closed his eyes.


	33. Through the Haunted Waste

"In Silk I met a banished Sheikah deadseer. She had no name, no clothes that could indicate her as a member of the tribe, even her tattoos were faded, or so it would seem to an outsider such as myself. She said she hadn't been back to Kakariko in a decade. She could no longer find the way. 'Why don't you just follow the ghosts of other villagers?' I asked her. She just laughed at me, and said, 'There's a reason these spirits haven't crossed over into the next world. Hardly one in a million knows the way anywhere. Ghosts are _ghosts_ because they're lost in the first place.'"

T.L. Malona, _Life and Travels of a Wayward Bard_

* * *

Palo sat cross-legged at the crest of a golden dune, his palms turned to the sky, as if he could interpret the pulses of white sunlight that beat down on his sensitive skin. He stared beyond his closed eyelids into the far haze of the desert, tattoos glowing dimly in the sandy wind. He wore a frown and furrowed brow indicative of deep thought.

Talm sat on the ground, picking particles of sand from under her fingernails, Nabru leaned against her spear, butt buried in the earth, watching him closely. Impa and Link stood by the horses, lounging at the small but clear oasis that served to mark the beginning of the stretch of land the Gerudo called the Haunted Waste.

"The horses are restless," Link said. He knew it was a useless thing to point out—the animals themselves made it obvious, but the half-nervous, half-bored silence of his companions made him uncomfortable enough to break it.

"They can sense the dead around us," Impa replied. "They're afraid of joining them." She brushed dust off her horse's twitching flank. "Eldine horses are not so skittish."

Link thought for a moment, filing through what he knew about the history of the province, about the city of Gorons and the razed towns along the mountain roads. "They are used to the dead," he said.

"Yes. Even well before the Eldin War, they were raised on grass watered with blood." She took a moment to glance over the horse's curved back, to where Palo sat silently on the top of a nearby dune. "Any non-native rancher would call for aid when his horses spooked for no reason. Back then, deadseers were in high demand—common, even. But now… well, he's all we have left."

Link glanced over at the man in question for a moment, but his mind hesitated on the mountains of Eldin. "One of the lieutenants, at the King's camp, mentioned something about Ordona invading."

Impa frowned. "Yes. The Sheikah are no strangers to trying times. Well before Ganond came to Hyrule, we had to stave off the attacks of neighboring provinces. When the Ordishmen found that our soil was rich and our forests wild, they came over in droves, cutting us down where they found us. For years both the Gorons and Sheikah fought to retain their ancestral land, but after so many decades of slaughter, we grew tired, our numbers grew thin. The royal family stepped in as mediators, and lent us a sympathetic ear. By royal decree, the lowlands were ceded to the Ordish, and we got the mountains." Impa ran her hand down her horse's grey neck thoughtfully. "I suppose, given the circumstances, it was the best they could do for us. But we had to give up our capital city."

"Old Riko?"

"It was still called Kakariko back then. My people rebuilt it in the mountains, where no outsiders could find it and take it from us the same way they had stolen our last capital." She grasped a few stray hairs of mane in her fingers and twisted them gently. "Ordona wanted the whole province. But the queen did not let that happen—she negotiated a truce between us and secured peace in Eldin. The royal family has been my people's closest ally for as long as our records go back. Besides the Gorons, of course." She sighed. "But now they are gone."

Link's lungs emptied when he thought of the triumphant bragging of the King's lords around their feasting table in Onrago. An image of Haema with a war hammer flashed through his mind, but it made way for the face of the yellow-haired girl as she fell from the battlements. "And so is the royal family."

When Impa raised her red eyes to him, he could not read the expression behind them. "We have few allies left. That is why we must protect the ones we have now." Her gaze wandered to Nabru, lounging against her spear. "We cannot let the Gerudo Territories fall." Hearing the conviction of her words forced Link to reassess his hope that the King might make peace with the Sheikah. Each had an utter determination that could not surmount the vast rift that split their goals and convictions.

A cry from Palo wrested Impa from her thoughtful muttering, and Link from his silent contemplation. He followed her as she stepped around their horses, toward the deadseer, who had now tumbled off the crest of the dune and lay on his back in the sand. Eyes still closed, the lenses of his tattoos stared into the white sky, glinting. Nabru and Talm skipped up and knelt at his side, and he twitched a few times before opening his mouth to groan.

Nabru put her large hands under his shoulder blades and helped Impa pull him into a sitting position—his head drooped for a moment before he lifted it, and gazed at them all through his eerie, glowing tattoos.

"He told me what you wanted," Palo said. His voice had certainly come from his own throat; it had the same timbre and pitch as Palo, but the inflection, the accent, was wrong. It was as if someone else's words had come out using his voice, and it made Link reel in surprise.

Even Nabru seemed startled. But she held onto Palo, keeping him upright, as the Sheikah sisters, who were not nearly as bewildered at his odd necromancy, leaned forward.

"Are you willing to guide us through the wasteland?" Impa asked Palo, or the person who now occupied the space behind Palo's decorated eyelids.

"Perhaps. I've only a moment right now—but I could not in good conscious continue without warning you."

"Warning us about what?"

Palo's tattoos moved from Impa to Nabru. "I once chose to trust a Gerudo, too. Although it makes no difference to me if you follow her or not, I felt as if I should tell you. To go to the other side of the Waste only invites death. I will guide you there, but if this woman is like her compatriots, you likely will not return."

Talm gulped, but nodded in assent when her sister spoke on all their behalf. "We wish to go regardless."

"Very well."

Palo went limp for a moment in Nabru's arms. His head bobbed forward, before he jerked it upright, as if he had fallen asleep sitting and jolted himself awake. He opened his eyes.

"Well?" Impa asked him, as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened.

"He's our best chance," Palo replied. He stood up, Nabru still holding his elbow. She backed away when he brushed himself off, good as new, and declined further support. "He's not pleasant, oh no. But he knows the way. There aren't too many spirits who have made it all the way through the Waste. Fewer still who remember how." He crossed his arms and sighed. "Most travelers die before ever getting to the other side, so they're useless to us."

Impa turned back to the horses. "I'm glad you found one at all."

Palo followed, folding his hands behind his head. "He's quite insistent that Nabru is going to murder the lot of us once we arrive on the other side of the Waste." The Gerudo raised her eyebrow indignantly. "It happened to him, after all. He and his team followed their guide to the hideout of some cult in order to study their dying language. Turns out the blood of linguists is a hearty meal for their old goddesses." Palo shook his head. "I should let him know you already tried to feed us to your god, and she did not find us fit to eat."

Nabru laughed, pulling herself up onto her mare. "Which cult? I know of a few who are not shy about their histories of throwing helpless men into the hungry mouths of their deities."

Palo closed his eyes for a moment as he swung his leg over his horse—he seemed to be looking at something beyond the horizon. His lips moved slightly, shaping a few syllables. "The Sisterhood of the Nameless."

"Ah. The Colossus witches." Nabru nodded knowingly. "Your little ghost will be reassured to know they have all long since left this world."

"Nice to know we won't have to deal with them, if they're dead," Talm said.

"But I said nothing about death," Nabru replied. "For a Gerudo witch, leaving this world can mean one of many things. Regardless of how they departed, they are at least no threat to us. Their temple has long since been abandoned." Nabru's brow furrowed. "There are few monuments beyond the Waste, and the Colossus is the nearest. It is likely your King is headed for it."

"Then we ought to be on our way," Palo said. He urged his horse into a trot. It kicked up sand behind it as he guided it away from the oasis and into the desert. Link followed, glancing over at Impa before nudging his mount after Palo's.

The deadseer spent most of the journey with his eyes closed. The going was slow, obscured by the shadowy haze of the mild sandstorms that billowed in their wake, and when Link would glance over to assess the state of his companions, he would catch a glimpse of Palo's glowing tattoos in the dusty light. Occasionally the deadseer would mutter something nonsensical under his breath, or turn his head up to the sky and mouth silent words; sometimes he would rein his horse to a complete stop, the others lounging impatiently behind him, as he stared into nothingness. After a few minutes, he would regain himself, and nudge his mount onward as if uninterrupted.

The sun set ahead of them, protracting their shadows across the scattered sands. Link's stomach rumbled, and as the sun slipped behind the dunes, he reached down for his flagon and wet his aching throat. But Palo kept riding in silence, stopping and starting, seemingly wandering aimlessly.

Link urged his horse next to Impa's and leaned over to her. "Are you sure he's leading us the right way? I mean… the ghost. Not Palo."

Impa smiled at the question. "Deadseeing is a taxing endeavor, Link. It is difficult to talk to those who have passed on—it is a slow and draining process. But Palo has never let a spirit deceive him. I've no doubt we will make it through this wasteland."

The confidence in her voice reassured him. As the moon rose behind them, and the desert chill swept down on them from the sky, the kept on. The horses trod haltingly onward, shaking their heads and snorting. Link ran his hand across his mare's neck, trying to lend it some reassurance, but as the freezing night descended on them, swallowing the wasteland, he couldn't help but share in its anxiety.

They travelled through the night. Link's head bobbed as he dozed off and jerked awake, only to have the horse's rhythmic sways lull him back into a shallow half-sleep. He saw nothing interesting to occupy his thoughts—the Haunted Waste was devoid of any landmarks or monuments, and even the dunes, which had rolled with such consistency in the other parts of the desert, had shallowed and flattened. The only movement he could make out was the thin swirling of the wind kicking up sand, the only waymarkers he had were the stars, dimmed and obscured by the dust clouds. There was nothing but flat, endless sand in every direction.

When the sun rose, distant and pallid, discolored in the brown wind, Palo sped up his horse. Link, brought to life again from his mindless stupor at the sudden action, kicked his steed and followed. The horse, perhaps yearning for an end to the monotony, eagerly complied, and the group galloped for a few long minutes before Palo drew in his reins and his horse skidded to a halt.

Before them, pristine and untouched by the mild, constant sandstorm that had accompanied them all the way through the wasteland, glinted a blue oasis. A few trees arched over the pond, fan leaves waving in the breeze. Vegetation, hearty but sparse, dotted the soil around the teal water. Far beyond the oasis, obscured in the haze of sunrise, jutted a massive mesa with an unnaturally flat top. It struck Link as a table on which gods might eat.

The horses, eager for water, stepped to the oasis, and Nabru slid from her mare. She patted her horse's side as she eyed the monstrous rock standing tall against the sky. "This is it," she said, and Palo nodded, dropping to the ground beside her. "We must be cautious," she continued. "There are far more frightening things in the desert than that King of yours." She crossed her arms. "But still, if he is already here, we must stay hidden." She pointed past the rock, to the south. "They will arrive from that direction, if they did not make the mistake of wandering through the Waste. We'll have to tie the horses out of sight, and cover our tracks."

Link let his horse drink, and knelt down beside it to fill himself and his flagon with the clear water. Nabru walked to the other side of the oasis, squinting at the distant, rectangular rock. When she returned, she led them to a small collection of boulders, behind which she tied her mare. The others followed suit, and when their horses were hidden to her satisfaction, they set off toward the giant rock.

They took a circuitous route, occasionally stopping to let Impa remove her lyre from her back and play a tune that produced a gust of wind. When her song threw enough sand over their tracks to cover them sufficiently, they continued on. Once they stopped to feed themselves, since they had not eaten anywhere in the Haunted Waste. It was past midmorning by the time they got close enough to the mesa for Link to discern its features.

He saw cliffs of brown and red, a few hardy, thin plants clinging to their tall, cracked surfaces. The long rocks cast shadows where they split from the cliffs, arcing toward the sky, or where they protruded and retreated from the main body like grooves in some sort of giant tree bark. A few pillars jutted from the sand, remerging at the top of the mesa, like numerous, red legs of a massive rock table.

But most magnificent of the features of the rock was the Colossus itself, carved into the cliff's red surface. It bore the likeness of a woman, cross-legged, eyes closed, hands open across her chest in some sort of religious salute. Link wondered how long it had taken to carve the woman, wondered which one of the masons had the courage to climb the cliffs only to chisel out the perfect lines of her thick eyelashes, the elegant curve of her snake-like headdress. As he drew closer, the absurdly intricate details of her became clear—from each individual stone strand of her long hair, to the nails on her bare feet. Whoever had carved this goddess had done an impeccable job; so much so that Link would not be surprised to see her get up, push herself off the wall of the mesa, and go for a walk.

At the base of her crossed legs stood a row of impressive columns, beyond which loomed a massive arched doorway, framed with intricate carvings of worms, women, and what Link could make out as some Gerudo writing. It would've been quite the portal to pass through, if it had not been blocked. Large, yellowish bricks had been stacked in the doorway, carved to perfectly fit the shape of the passage. Nabru examined the stones, pushing against them, kicking at them, only to find they were solidly placed. She tried to wedge her fingers into the small cracks between each stone, but they only came away dusty with mortar.

"I suppose one of you Sheikah lot will have to work your witchcraft," she said.

Palo glanced at Talm. "I don't know what you expect us to do about it," he said. "I don't know about Talm, but I didn't bring any explosives with me."

"Have her do that thing with her harp."

Impa flinched. "I can try." She stepped up to the doorway, and after a deep breath, drew her fingers across her lyre. The shrill sound nearly knocked Link to his knees, and his hands rushed up to his ears as Impa's arm flew back, sending a wave of power from the strings. When the sound subsided, echoing in to the desert, they uncovered their ears and stepped to the doorway, only to find she had dislodged nothing more than a few pebbles.

Talm scratched her head. "That was… disappointing."

Impa sighed. "I suppose we ought to think up something else."

A long conversation began. They heatedly and quickly discussed the merits of having Impa try once more, twice, however many times it took until the whole front of the temple down; they estimated the time it might take to find an alternate passage and whether it was worth it, they even discussed climbing the Colossus and trying to find a way inside through the canals of her ears.

While the conversation echoed across the sandy portico, Link turned his gaze to his surroundings. He had little to offer the conversation: he did not have an instrument capable of expelling waves of fury, like Impa, he did not have sufficient knowledge of Sheikah bomb-craft to blast in through the door, nor did he have the strength to scale the Colossus and find a way inside. All he had were his wits and his keen senses.

He saw nothing at first that piqued his interest. Only endless sand and a few rocks scattered around the entrance to the temple. When his eye caught a slight streak of movement, he decided he might as well investigate it. He was useless enough just standing there, so he stepped away from the portico, past the Colossus' bent knee. The intricately carved stone made way for plain, jagged rock, and he climbed off the platform and down into the white sand, hoping to get a better look at whatever had caught his eye.

What he saw surprised him, but only because he had not expected to encounter another living being so far into the vast wasteland. It was a small fox, sand-colored like everything else, large ears flaring from the side of its head like two white sails. It had a delicate face, furry cheeks tapering to a dainty muzzle, dotted at the end with a little black nose. Its eyes were the same deep gold as Nabru's, and glinted with the same wild fierceness. Link had seen this face before, atop the shoulders of the statues of fox nymphs which stood tall against the temple walls in Obra Garud. He wondered if this creature was indeed a nymph, in its full animal form, or if it was some sort of spiritual guide, willing to lead him to his destination the same way the wolf had on Eldin, so many months ago.

Just to see if the animal would tolerate his presence, he scooted closer to it, lifting his arm and reaching out. With a flash of its teeth and a dissatisfied flick of its bushy tail, the sand fox fled. It skittered across the white ground, kicking up dust where its tiny feet landed, but it left a distinct trail Link figured he had no better option than to follow. He knew it was an illogical reaction stemming from a childish disposition, but always his first instinct was to follow an animal that had run from him. He tracked the small steps of the creature, away from the Colossus and along the tall walls of the mesa.

The tracks led a few dozen yards away from the temple entrance, and terminated at a small crevice, shaded between two outcroppings of red rocks. Link knelt by the opening and peered inside, wondering if he'd glimpse the surprised face of the white fox staring back at him, but he saw only darkness. He muttered his disappointment and prepared to pull himself back to his feet, but the echo of his voice kept him kneeling. The sound that had returned to him from the hole was not muffled and shallow, as it would have been had he spoken into a fox-sized den. He wasn't too experienced with the nuances of sound, but he had lingered under the echoes of Elder Merel's cave and its offshoots enough to know whatever cavern lay beyond the hole was larger than he'd anticipated.

He pushed his arm into the hole, half expecting to feel teeth clamp down on his fingers any second, but he felt nothing sharp, nothing harmful. The walls of whatever tunnel lay beyond the opening widened fast, and it felt as if he was groping not a thin passage, but the expansive wall of some sort of chamber. If the hole opened up so quickly, it would take little work to fit himself inside the opening and see what lay beyond. So he removed his sword and shield from his back and set them aside. He dug at the hole, scooping fistfuls of sand until it had widened enough for him to fit through. He put his feet into the darkness first—he figured if he were to be bitten by the fox (or any other creature waiting in the shadows), he'd rather be bitten on his toes than his face. He pushed himself off the sand and slid into the hole.

The drop was short and mild, but it was enough that it forced his stomach into his throat. His feet hit sand with a soft thud, and he fell forward, into the cold darkness of the cave, his momentum carrying him into something of a tumble. When he regained his footing, he stood up and dusted himself off, catching his breath for a moment. A streak of thin light poured in from the opening, but it was not enough to illuminate his surroundings. He groped in the darkness for a moment, standing on his toes and reaching up to see if he could feel the ceiling, but it was too far above him. So he turned his attention back to the small entrance.

It stood a little higher than his head, and was small enough that he could hardly believe he had managed to wiggle through it in the first place, but he knew that given enough time, and with more than a little effort on his part, he could haul himself back through and inform Impa and the others of his discovery. He was just about to grip the stones around the small opening when suddenly a face appeared on the other side. It seemed a featureless silhouette against the bright sun, but Link could tell from the messy bun that it belonged to Talm. When he crept a little closer to the fissure, he could see her red eyes twinkle and the corners of her thick lips upturn a little.

"Did you get stuck in there?" she asked. "Do you need me to help you out?" She seemed more amused than surprised to find Link in this odd sort of predicament.

"I don't think so," he answered. "I think this might be a way inside the temple."

"Well, you seem to be inside _something_ , which is much better than we were doing," she said. Talm kicked at the opening, spraying dust into the chamber. Link backed up, wiping grains from his eyes and coughing. When she finished widening the hole enough for her to slip through, she landed on the floor next to him and asked if he was all right.

With his confirmation, she reached into the leather pouch she kept at her waist for some flint. She pulled a thin stick and a strip of cloth from the pack and fashioned a small torch (Link could tell she had executed this maneuver many times before with little or no light), and managed to fill the room with a yellowed glow.

They found themselves not in a natural cave, but what was no doubt a temple chamber. The walls were decorated plainly, images of moons and stars carved into the large, crumbling bricks. In the far wall stood a thin doorway, beyond which lay only darkness. Spiderwebs clung to the ceiling and trembled in the corners, and small animal droppings littered the floor. Talm glanced down at her feet in disgust for a moment before handing the torch to Link.

"It's not the most glamorous of entrances," she sighed. "But it'll have to do." Link held the torch high as she made her way back to the small opening. "We split up to search for you after we noticed you'd snuck off." She glanced over her shoulder and gave him a pretty smile. "You did a good job of giving us the slip. Pretty soon you'll outdo us Sheikah."

Link basked in her words, swelling a little with pride, but checked his own ego when he saw how she pulled herself up through the opening in one swift, smooth motion. He could not move like that—and he knew he had quite a bit of learning to do before he could earn himself any more compliments from her. Gracefully, she lowered her head back to the hole and smiled. "Wait here while I fetch the others."

Link stood alone with the flickering torch as her silhouette left the crevice. He took in his surroundings and breathed the cool air, shivering. He watched the shadows dance across the crumbling bricks and wondered what sort of ghosts, creatures and curses inhabited the walls around him. But before he could scare himself into a panic, he heard familiar voices approach, muffled on the other side of the wall. Talm's face appeared again at the fissure and she greeted him with a smile.

She slid through the opening, followed by her slender sister, who grabbed Link's effects on the way in. Next came the head of Nabru's glinting spear, with which she picked at the sides of the hole, shoveling away sand until it was wide enough for even her broad shoulders to fit through. Palo came last, perhaps out of caution, or perhaps because he wanted to view the odd spectacle of Nabru squeezing herself into the crevice from a well-lit vantage point.

When they all stood at the center of the dusty room, Impa took the torch from Link in exchange for his sword and shield. Her smile widened in the dim firelight. "Did you follow an animal here?" she asked. He could tell she spoke only half in jest.

"A sand fox," he answered, and Impa's face broke into a grin.

Nabru laughed, clasping his shoulder so hard he could swear he felt a bruise forming. "You're a bit of a sand fox yourself, kid," she said. "Pretty insightful for a deaf man."

"Who told you I was deaf?" he asked. He hadn't recalled divulging that information to her.

"You've a reputation among a few of the more well-informed soldiers," Nabru answered. "But mostly you're known as the kid Galra stuck her tongue into. Lucky boy." Link couldn't quite make out Nabru's face, but he recognized a wink. The Gerudo laughed and swung her spear over her shoulder, looking beyond Impa to the passageway leading deeper into the temple. "Now, business. To the belly of the Colossus, pregnant with who knows what horrors."

Link chose to wear her confidence as a shield against his fears, and fell into step behind her as they all followed Impa and her reassuring torchlight deeper into the temple.

* * *

Oh man. It's almost been a full year since I started this mess of a fanfiction. Feels like forever and no time at all; I'm sure you're all familiar with that threadbare but eerily applicable platitude. As usual, I'd like to thank everyone who's read and especially those who've left feedback. It means a lot to me, it truly does, it makes my day and I'm eager for any opportunity to think critically about and improve my writing. So thanks all of you who've stuck with this thing for the year. You're wonderful, all of you!


	34. The End of All Things

"The priests of Hylian deities often prophesy the world will end in fire, heat and destruction, as the patience of the benevolent goddesses wears thin with the sins of mortals. The Gerudo, however, foretell a different, calmer apocalypse. One day, without warning and with no one at fault, rain will come to the desert. The water will fill the oases and towns, flowing from the sands to all surrounding countries, until no land is left uncovered. All will die, but it will be a serene, silent death, and the world will sleep in darkness until the gods decide to remake it as it once was. Then, time will begin again, all that has passed will pass again, and life will continue as it always had, in the same way it always had. That is, until the next World Flood."

Edra Li, "Why the Worm Eats Her Own Tail"

* * *

The cavernous hall was silent, save for the airy sounds of Impa's torch. The light fell over the walls, casting flickers on the crumbling bricks, amplifying the shadows of the cobwebs that covered the stone. Insects and rodents had made their homes in the pitted walls; ants and tiny red spiders crept along the rocks, and in the larger holes some creatures had stuffed twigs and fur for bedding. With each step, Link could hear the quiet squeaks and skittering of mice. A rogue centipede, perhaps half a foot in length, crept from a crevice between two bricks and wiggled its long antennae at Talm. She reeled in disgust, with something of a muffled yelp.

Nabru's laugh echoed so loudly through the hall Link thought it would send the ceiling tumbling down on them. "What, you're going to tremble like a little boy at the sight of a bug?" She reached out and crushed the insect's head between two large fingers. Talm scowled, but Nabru had only a proud smile to offer her. "Fear not, maiden. I will protect you."

Talm only crossed her arms, avoiding the small splatter of yellowish slime where the centipede had met its end. She fell into step behind Impa in silence, as the floor of the dim hallway began to slope downward.

"I can't say I'm fond of where this is going," Palo said with a hint of irritation. "Few good things happen this deep under the earth."

"And those few good things happened only when the Gorons were still living," Impa replied. She trod onward anyway, no fear in her voice, no hesitation in her strides.

Nabru shook her head. "My people's livelihood is made beneath the earth," she said. "Or have you forgotten already the origin of wormsilk?" She seemed unconcerned with the path's downward slope, but when the shallow incline made way for a rapidly descending staircase of crumbling stone, she hardly seemed pleased.

"Well, this just got worse," Palo said. Link could sense no anxiety in his voice, only annoyance at the inconvenience of how much further it seemed they would have to go.

"We have a guide now," Nabru said. All turned to her, eyebrows raised, and she motioned toward the wall to her right. "Look."

Link did. Where there had been plain brick before, adorned with nothing but spiderwebs and insect dens, there was now a wall of intricate carvings. He stepped back as far as he could before he hit the opposite wall, and examined the pictures of stone and shadow. Shapes danced against the light of the torch, the most prominent of which was the image of a long, armored worm, curling from the top of the stairway and extending to the darkness far below. Other carvings surrounded it—depictions of fox nymphs, long-haired women with arms raised to the sky, and stone-carved fields of wheat, dunes and phases of the moon. It fascinated him, but he was not sure how it would guide them from one end of the temple to the other.

Nabru decided to assuage their curiosity. "It is the story of the world," she told them, grimacing as if they should have known. It did not appear to Link to be a narrative of any form at all, but he took another long glance at the wall, lit by Impa's flickering torch. "Here, we have the beginning," the Gerudo continued, motioning to the base of the wall, where the worm's body first emerged from the sand. "This is when the world was born, when Molgera came from the ground and birthed all other life from her mouth." Link could not see the worm's mouth depicted in the brick—her length spanned farther than his eyes could make out, but he did spy leaves of grass sprout below her body, the outlines of wild animals and women on their knees, worshipping their mother goddess. He followed Nabru's finger as it pointed out the chronology of the world. "Here is where civilization begins."

"Where?" Talm asked, and Nabru led her down the hall, waving at the illustration of the rise of Gerudo society. Link could make out the rounded tops of buildings carved into the wall, much like the temples he'd seen in Obra Garud.

"This is the beginning of the other races," Nabru said, tracing her finger across a carving that was all but incomprehensible to Link. "First come the Gerudo, then from them descend the other peoples of the world—the Sheikah, the Hylians, and all other sects and colors. From different gods rise the Zora, and the Gorons, and the tree-people of the south…" Nabru's face contorted in thought. "I can't tell you which gods created them. Galra told me once, but it went in one ear and out the other, as they say."

Link was impressed regardless; it was far more than he had ever known about any mythology. All he knew of were Hylia and her daughters, matron deities of his race, and the wild god-spirits of the Sheikah, who did not claim to create anything. The birth of the world through Molgera's mouth was new to him, but believable enough. After all, he was not offered an alternative theory from Impa or her people—when they spoke of gods, they spoke not of benevolence or creation, but of duty and protection, healing and full harvests. The Sheikah did not claim to know from where the world had sprung.

Nabru led them along the wall, showing them how the newly-created people dispersed—the Zora into the water, the Gorons into the mountains, the Hylians and similar races into the corners of the habitable world. A few minutes after the excitement of creation died down, and the length of the stone worm writhed around the walls and ceiling with years of early history etched on her belly, they encountered the first fork in the passage. Nabru ambled to a halt, raising her eyes to the ceiling, where the armored stomach of the worm's image split in two. "Ah, so this is how it is."

"How it is?" Impa asked, raising her torch so Nabru could see better by its yellow light.

"This is the birth of our first king. The first male child ever born in the desert." Her yellow eyes wandered from the left passage to the right. "The story goes that the moment of his birth, the worst sandstorm in our history swept over the desert and blotted out the sun for a week. Only one of these passages shows that." Her finger wandered to the left. "So, that is our path."

By the light of Impa's torch, and occasionally stopping to recall the events of her people's history, Nabur led them through the passages and stairwells of the dark temple—winding, straightening, ascending, descending and ascending again. More than once Link considered the possibility she might misremember the story and lead them all into a trap, but even when she wavered, her indecision lasted no more than a few seconds. She was confident, and Link supposed he would have to be, too.

Nabru seemed to enjoy the game. Whenever there came a fork or a particularly interesting illustration in the narrative, she would stop to point it out—this famine and that queen's reign, this war and that founding of a city-fortress. She led them through dozens of Molgera's molts, occurring every century or so, until the passage narrowed and the events under the worm took on a more catastrophic, abstract tone.

"We are nearing the end of the world," Nabru said. She nodded to the carving of the worm that had accompanied them through the darkness. "Unfortunately, it only ends one way." Link did not ask—partially because he was not particularly anxious to know, and partially because before he could form the words of his query, Talm let out a surprised cry.

"Something is shining down there," she said, almost eagerly. Link wondered if she had spied jewels or other such treasure, from the way her voice lifted. He trotted down the stairs after her and her sister, until he came across what was most definitely the end of their route.

Below him glinted dark water, surface reflecting flickers of torchlight. The stairs descended into the silent ripples uninterrupted, leading ever downward into the water. The forward march seemed to terminate here—at the other end of the small pool stood a wall, the bottom half of which lay submerged. Link squeezed his way between the sisters and knelt at the edge of the pool, staring into it, trying to make out a possible path forward.

"And here we are," Nabru said. "The drowned world."

Link raised his eyes from the black water to her frowning face. His gaze wandered back to the wall, to the infinite length of the worm, twisting down into the pool with ease and confidence. There was nowhere else to go but into the water. "The worm keeps going," he said, gesturing to it. "Even though the world ends."

Nabru nodded. "Of course she does. The Worm is eternal." She pulled her spear from her shoulder and leaned on it, staring into the water. "But I am not. I'm afraid if you'd like me to come down there with you, be warned I might not emerge again." Something of a grimace crossed her features. "We of the desert are not the most graceful swimmers."

"Just hold your breath and I'll drag you along the bottom," Palo offered.

Nabru laughed, perhaps nervously, perhaps with a little frustration at having finally encountered an obstacle that actually threatened to impede her. She stared at the pool as if considering letting Palo lead her down into the water, when Impa shoved the torch into Link's hands and removed her harp from her back.

"I doubt this will work, but it's worth a try," she said. She spread her feet wide, as if preparing for the recoil from plucking her strings, and ran her fingers across the lyre. A strange singing came from the instrument, eerie and quiet. It forced ripples through the surface of the water, coaxing the liquid up and away from the center of the pool. The dark water undulated and foamed, climbing up the walls, splitting and churning to the vibrations of the old strings, until Link could make out a small passage at the base of the wall ahead of them. It appeared from the rapidly retreating water, narrow, dark and wet, but certainly big enough for them to pass through. Impa pulled at one last note and the path became clear—until the sound faded and the water splashed back down into the pool, churning with dark foam and submerging the passage again in darkness.

"Forgive me," Impa panted. "I can't hold up that much water for long."

"At least we know there's a way forward," her sister said. She dropped her bag at her feet and removed her desert cloak. "I'll swim ahead and see if there's a place to come up." She had her sleeves rolled and her pointed shoes off before her sister could protest. Link just held the torch up as Talm dove into the water, nimbly sliding beneath the black surface.

A few bubbles popped up behind her, and Link stared into the water, heart pounding in his throat. The others watched with equal intensity in deafening silence, eyeing the ripples for any sign of their companion's return. After what seemed to him far too long, Talm reemerged with a loud, desperate gasp. Impa knelt by the waterside and clasped her arm, pulling her to dry rock. She rolled onto her back and caught her breath for a moment before speaking.

"It'll be… a stretch," she panted. "But take a few deep breaths… beforehand, and you'll be fine."

Impa waited for her sister's breathing to slow before stepping into the water herself. She glanced back at Link, holding the torch above him, and narrowed her eyes. "If we leave the torch back here by the stairs, can we still swim by its light?"

Talm shook her head. "It took only a few kicks before I couldn't see the light anymore. It'll be pitch black, but I can get us to the other side. Just hold onto me and we'll get there. We'll have to light another torch when we reemerge."

"I didn't think we'd encounter water in a place like this," Impa sighed. "But if we keep the wood and flint in the inner pouch of Palo's pack, it might stay dry." They spent the next few moments debating which valuables to secure in Palo's watertight sheep-stomach pouch, and packing them accordingly. Most of their food and other necessities still sat in the saddlebags with the horses, safely hidden near the oasis.

When all was sorted, and Talm sank down into the water, Impa followed her closely, grasping the folds of her clothes for guidance. Link, in turn, grabbed Impa, and when Palo's hand secured itself around his belt, he heard Nabru's low, dissatisfied voice carry across the small chamber. "If you let me drown, deadseer, there will be no afterlife for me. I will haunt and torment you for the rest of your days."

"Duly noted," he replied. He didn't bother to mention to her that he was probably used to that sort of thing already. He gripped the butt of her spear, she held the side nearest the blade, and he led her into the water after them.

"Are we prepared?" Talm asked. Although a definite no, Link's answer stayed put in his throat. The sisters knew he wasn't the best swimmer, even after those lessons in the river near Kakariko, but he knew he could trust them to guide him. When he nodded cautiously, Talm took a large breath and dove.

As Link lowered himself into the water, he filled his lungs with the temple's dusty air. The pool wasn't particularly cold, but he couldn't help but tremble a little as he submerged his head and opened his eyes. He could see very little of the underwater passageway—it seemed the torch's light could not penetrate the pool more than a few feet.

Link gripped the sash around Impa's hips a little harder as she swam forward. They sank toward the flat floor of the passageway, and by the time his feet touched the stone, the surface light had dimmed to nothing more than a distant flicker. He could see nothing; he could only feel the tug of Impa's clothing as she led him through the black water. Palo's hand gripped harder around his belt, and he propelled himself forward with his free hand, deeper into the darkness.

After less time than he would've liked, his lungs started to ache, and he could hear his heart beat desperately in his chest. When shadow enveloped him fully and the last light of the distant torch faded, he started counting, begging each second to be the one where he could kick off the bottom and breathe. Impa sped, pulling him a little harder, and he wondered if they were nearing the end of the passage, or if Talm had managed to lead them to a dead end. He did not know if he had enough air to return to the stairwell.

His fingers were numb, his hands weak, so when Impa's sash slipped from his grip, it took him a second to realize he'd lost his guide. He didn't know how, or when, but suddenly he could feel nothing but water in his hands. Before him loomed absolute darkness—whatever shadows Impa disappeared into had swallowed her wholly. She was gone.

Link began to panic. His heart leapt into his throat, his lungs seemed to twist in his chest, and every inch of him screamed for air. He almost kicked off the bottom of the passageway, toward what might, just _might,_ have been a pocket of air. If there was only a bump in the stone, a small perturbation into which air had trickled up, he would be able to refill his lungs, to continue on and find Impa—

Then he realized Palo's hand still gripped his belt. Both his companions behind him were as blind as he was, and would follow him wherever he went. They had put their full faith in him, and here he was, floating aimlessly in the darkness, drowning in his own cowardice. He was not doing any of them any good. He thought of the choice words Palo would have for him if he stopped and panicked and drowned in the center of the dark waterway. He thought of Nabru, equally blind, holding the end of her spear, and her anxiety that should she die in water, she would not find her way into the afterlife.

Link let out a few bubbles and pushed forward. His lungs screamed, his legs ached, and he stretched out his hands to grope in the darkness for any obstacles. The weight of the two people behind him kept the going slow, but Link pushed on, praying, heart struggling to pump what was left of his breath into his blood.

When the tips of his fingers touched a wall of stone, he knew he could go no farther. If this was a turn in the passageway, he was afraid Palo would have to continue without him. He pushed off the bottom and floated blindly up, up toward what was equally likely to be solid stone as it was to be breathable air.

When he burst from the water and gasped for breath, he nearly cried in relief. Palo bobbed up behind him, grunting as he pulled Nabru heavily after him. She broke the surface with a gasp and a cry of joy, her voice immediately descending into a gurgle when she sank back down into it.

"Help me with her," Palo's voice echoed in the darkness, and Link groped his way over to them. He felt for Nabru's arm and gripped it as she again broke the surface, coughing.

"There's a platform over here." Impa's voice hit Link's ears like music. He helped Palo drag their splashing Gerudo companion to the source of her words, and soon they had all pulled themselves on a flat expanse of rock. Link could hear Palo rustling through his pack as he searched for dry material. Nabru kept muttering to herself in Gerudo between coughs; Link couldn't understand the words, but he could make out the grateful sentiment—she must've been offering thanks to whatever god had led her through that water, despite Link's ineptitude.

Suddenly Talm's breathless voice filled the room, sharp with disquiet. "What was that?"

"What was what?" Impa's was calm, but noticeably cautious.

"Something there, right _there_."

Someone cried out, and with a harrowing sound of tense string, a flash of light burst from Impa's harp. The room filled in a split-second with sharp blue, blinding Link more than the darkness could, but before the light snuffed out, he could make out a horrible, hairy shape lurch toward Impa, long legs dancing, fangs probing. Before Impa could strike her harp again and summon another flash of light, a cry echoed through the room, followed by the sound of metal meeting flesh and a horrid, inhuman screech.

Link desperately pulled himself from the floor, stumbling toward the source of the commotion, but before he got there, the noise died down, replaced only by Talm's shallow panting. As Link groped for the sisters, Palo managed to pull out his flint and light a torch.

The yellow glow filled the watery chamber, and Link stepped back, revulsion turning his stomach. The body of a spider, larger than a hound, convulsed on the stones, hairy legs twitching in its death throes. Talm stood over it, twin swords drawn, and watched the yellowish blood spurt from its middle, her face contorted in revulsion. When the spider finally stopped moving, Talm leaned to her sister, gripping the wet edge of her sash, and cleaned her blade on it. "This is officially the most disgusting mission I've been on," she growled.

"Don't wipe that on me," Impa said, trying to tug her clothes from her sister.

"You owe me one for saving your life. I'm not getting any of that gross blood on me, that's for sure."

Palo shook his head, helping Nabru off the wet stone platform and toward the sisters. "I guess next time we all go down a cobwebby hole you can wait outside," he smiled. Nabru shook the water from her spear and stood at Talm's side, watching her wipe her sword on her frowning sister's clothes. Impa endured the indignity, instead turning her attention to the passageway beyond the room, which, much like the hallways that had come before, led into darkness. When Talm had her swords cleaned to her satisfaction, she slid them back into their sheaths and retreated from the spider's corpse. Palo, the new torch-bearer, stepped ahead, and with an air of reserved caution led them into the hallway.

The passage was plain and narrow, and led sharply upward. There were no illustrations of the world's history, no arachnids of absurd proportions, no pools, no obstacles, no worm (Nabru theorized the carving had looped around beneath the water and met its own tail back at the top of the stairwell). They followed the straight path in silence, occasionally stopping to catch their breath when the climb steepened. Palo led them up the slope until the corridor widened, terminating in a large doorway. Dim light, perhaps from a distant window, poured through the passage, and Palo stepped through, raising his torch. The others followed, and emerged into a large, golden-lit hall.

Small round windows, multitudinous and intricately arranged into geometric patterns, shone high on the ceiling. Link crept past Palo and his now-lowered torch, mouth agape, trying to absorb what he saw. On the wall farthest to his left, past the dozen or so massive columns and the mosaic-studded floor of the temple, he recognized the shape of the blocked doorway. Brick and mortar sat firmly in its ornate frame, closing the temple off from the outside world. The only way into the room, besides their little hallway, seemed to be the tiny windows dotting the highest reaches of the sanctuary.

The walls of the massive hall were lined with statues in various poses: arms outstretched, hands clasped in prayer, fists raised as if to put up a good fight. Around them, between the pillars and crevices of the nave, lay ornate carvings of domestic scenes, battles, and rituals. Link would've liked to kneel and study these depictions, interpreting whatever stories they contained, but he could not keep his eyes from the farthest wall opposite the door. Carved in stone, with a vague expression of contentment, a monumental figure loomed, dressed and decorated much the same way as the giant woman of the Colossus herself. She sat cross-legged, hands upturned, elbows bent, a massive stone snake crawling up from her arm and wrapping around her head to form an elaborate headdress. Her eyes were closed, her look serene, and Link figured she must've been some sort of lauded priestess or goddess. At her feet stood a raised dais, and on that, an altar, draped in red cloth and coated in dust.

He could not stop himself from focusing the entirety of his attention to the altar below the goddess' knees. The same sort of curiosity that had taken hold of him in the temple on Eldin rushed through him again, and he stepped toward it. The sheer volume of dust that coated the red silk told him it had remained undisturbed for many years, so it was with a wave of satisfaction that he grabbed the corner of the cloth and threw it off the altar.

He was not sure if he actually had expected what sat before him. It was a small shard of metal, long and thin, nearly identical to the one he'd found at the altar of the god-spirits of Eldin. It glowed almost blue in the golden light, and as he looked at his reflection in the metal, his narrowed eyes and unsurprised frown, he knew in his heart he should have known as much. He reached out and gripped the metal lightly, so as not to cut himself on the still-sharp edge, simply because he knew he had no other option.

Suddenly Impa was beside him, watching him lift the scrap metal from the altar, the same half-expectant look on her face. Generally, Impa knew much more about everything than he did, but the expression she wore told him she had no answers. So he turned to Palo, who out of all of them, had the most reliable and voluminous pack. "Will you keep this for me?" he asked.

Palo, his look of bewilderment mild and fleeting, stepped forward and obliged, slipping the thin piece of metal into his bag. The other Sheikah, well-acquainted with silence and secretiveness, were used to the unexplainable, so they didn't counter his request with queries or demands for clarification. They could probably guess whatever information Link and Impa shared had been given to them on the peak of Eldin—they had no right to such knowledge.

Nabru, however, did a poor job of quelling her curiosity. "What _is_ that? Is that what your King wants?" she asked. Link could almost see the gears turn behind her intelligent eyes as she tried to determine the significance of what appeared to be a scrap of useless metal. But he could tell her nothing meaningful. He was nearly as ignorant as she was. He could not tell her if this is what the King desired so much he'd cross miles of wasteland to get to it. He could not tell her why, deep in the desert and far from the nation of Eldin, an abandoned temple of a long-dead witch cult would house a fragment that matched the one he had found on an altar to the Sheikah gods. He knew in his heart these two shards had come from the same whole, but he couldn't say why.

He could guess it had once been a blade of some kind. He did not know if it had been a dagger, a short sword, or a thin blade that might adorn the end of a spear, like Nabru's, or if it was a section of a massive broadsword, like the King carried. All he knew was that whatever it had been, it was not a common tool. But he didn't have time to dwell on the metal's past for long, nor did Nabru have time to interrogate him about it. The next moment she opened her mouth, instead of her deep voice, a savage boom echoed across the hall. They all turned their eyes to the doorway to see a rain of dust puff from between the bricks, just as another deep thump sounded.

It did not take anyone long to deduce who was pounding at the entrance to the temple. The volume of the strikes, the way the whole wall seemed to shake as the sounds echoed across the chamber, told Link it would not be long before the bricks crumbled and the King stepped into the temple. Cracks appeared in the stone, and another shower of dust fell from the doorway.

Impa, perpetually clear-minded, took a few seconds to throw the cloth back over the altar. She could not replace the dispersed dust, but at least to an unobservant eye, the altar could've looked undisturbed. Palo extinguished his torch and Nabru raised her spear, as if she wanted nothing more than to charge at the entrance. Impa gripped the Gerudo's arm in silence, and narrowed her eyes at the rocks trembling and crumbling at the door. She motioned for her companions to follow her before retreating into the shadows, away from the resounding bombardment at the entrance.


	35. A Goddess with no Name

"Any son of my brother is a son of mine."

Goron Precept

* * *

In the early hours of the desert night, when the last sliver of sun disappeared behind the distant dunes, Talporom sat cross-legged on the outer wall of Obra Garud, atop a particularly intricate marble arch. Curves of metal wrought around the stone provided him good enough handholds that he could carry Bloodletter up with him, slung heavy and absurd across his back. But when he pulled himself onto the arch's center, where the decorative stone and protective metal flattened into a comfortable ledge, he figured the trip was worth it. No one would follow him up here, to the heights of the wall—his self-imposed silence would not be broken by a nervous soldier desperate for orders, a commander wishing to discuss battle plans, a wandering civilian asking when the inevitable siege would begin. There would be no (or, at least few) little girls up here on the wall, asking where he was from and if they could touch his tattoos, and then, inevitably, slipping a hand into his waistband to see if they could pilfer a coin or two. He did not mind the girls, for the most part; their large, mischievous eyes reminded him of Talm's, and the contrition on their faces when he invariably caught them red-handed and gave them a stern talking-to reminded him of his daughters at their guiltiest.

Talporom pulled Bloodletter from its scabbard, and looked at himself in the reflective metal. He did not know how many years the blade had been in his family, but it showed few signs of wear, a scrape here and there on the metal, but not a hint of rust. He attributed it to his own meticulousness and that of his eldest daughter.

He pulled a cloth from his waist and ran it along the steel. His eyes lingered on his own hands (he wondered how they had gotten so wrinkled since the last time he'd looked), and knew if he did not have Bloodletter to care for he'd sit up here and bite his nails all night. _How many times have I cleaned this blade_? he thought. _How many times has she? Hundreds, thousands?_

He wondered how many hands it had passed through, how many parents cursed their children with the burden, and how many children were more than ecstatic to receive it. When he handed it to Impa for the first time, her palms were already worn and scarred from fighting. He could almost still feel the warmth of his brother's hand on its hilt as he extended it to her—she had known the fate of its last wielder well, and she received it eagerly anyway. She should've known better, they both should've, but the foolish smile she gave him that day warmed his treacherous heart.

And now the gods had given her something worse, and she had accepted it with grace and enthusiasm. After Impa had come back into his life after more than a year of absence, something about her had changed. He had expected as much—she was a young woman, still learning, still growing, but when she told him of her stableboy, of her failure in the Capital to save the young princess, about how the gods had called her up Eldin (she could say no more about it—Talporom knew the creed of silence that governed the mountain), he recognized that something fundamental about her had been lost.

When she showed him the new lyre Merel had given her and ran her fingers along the strings, what emerged from the instrument was not music, as he expected. It was not the calm, meticulous melodies she always plucked, it was not the language she had learned to speak as a girl and through which she communicated her deepest thoughts and longings. It was something violent, something inconceivable—it was a sharp light, a gust of wind, a feeling of unnatural sleepiness or a wave of force. He had almost wept for her in that moment.

He remembered the small girl at her mother's side, plucking the strings of her grandfather's instrument, content without words, immersed in her own form of communication. She had drawn such comfort from the instrument in times of stress or uncertainty. But now, the gods had turned her comfort into a thing of violence.

Talporom did not know if Impa cared. It was with a proud smile she showed him her new lyre, it was with a gratified glint in her eye that she pulled the strings. And he had to respect her position. After all, the power was hers to command, not his—he had no right making decisions about how she should feel. But he knew he would miss her arias and jigs, he would miss the daughter who could play tunes for her own enjoyment on a mundane instrument. On the rare occasions he would return to Kakariko, the first thing he'd ask of his daughters was a duet, frivolous Talm on the flute, Impa accompanying her with a severe but charming dignity. She always did take her music quite seriously.

But Mount Eldin changed people. He had seen it happen to Merel, he had seen it happen to his own mother, when he was a young boy. The day was still clear in his mind, when his mother had left his infant brother in his arms and followed her companion up the side of the mountain. A few days later, she had returned with a distant look in her eyes, and words of prophecy on her lips. She spoke of legends, of eternity, of repetition and the inevitable sins of the future. She spoke of the death of his brother years before it happened, she spoke of war yet to come and kings yet to fall.

 _Listen well, Talporom,_ she had said. _I am not long for this world, for I have already seen limitless years. Time overtakes you, no matter how long you run from it._ He had not known what she had meant—he still didn't, but he had some idea it was the price she paid for her gift. The future was reserved for the aged; Renepa's body, though not five decades old, succumbed to the burden of senescence her mind had brought on it. She left his world earlier than anyone expected, but she had bequeathed him enough cryptic words to occupy his own mind for a lifetime: _You must understand, child, I do not see forward in time. I simply see farther back than anyone else. I look over the walls that others choose not to._

Talporom wondered if his mother had seen Impa ascend Eldin. He wondered if she had seen him here this moment, either far in the future or infinite years in the past, cleaning his sword alone and thinking about both of them. He wondered if she knew the price Impa had paid for her new power—if her music had been the only cost, or if there was yet more she had to lose. He did not wish to dwell on it, but on quiet nights like this, when the looming threat of battle set everyone's mind ill at ease, he had little else to think about.

"Fancy finding an old man up here." The voice was musical, feminine, and instantly recognizable as Galra's. "But they say Sheikah don't age like the rest of us—spry and limber till the end."

Talporom did not take his eyes off Bloodletter. He watched the simpering face of the dancer in the blade's reflection as she lingered next to him. "What are you doing up here?" he asked her. He tried not to sound agitated.

"Every night, since I was a little girl, I would find a suitable place—the city wall, or a temple roof—and walk the length of it on my hands." She smiled. "It's how I upkeep my balance."

He did not disbelieve her, but she seemed eager to show him. She gripped the marble with bent fingers and lifted her legs above her, locked straight, toes pointed, and slowly made her way back and forth across one side of the arch, unconcerned with the danger, unimpeded by the slope of the marble. When she bent her legs over her head and twisted herself to her feet again, Talporom could not deny he was impressed.

"The real question," she said, panting a little, "is what _you're_ doing up here, when you should be down at the barracks, discussing strategy with my mother."

"There is little to discuss at this juncture. Haema has not moved an inch since he arrived here. We have fortified everything as needed. Now, we must focus on waiting without panicking." He resumed cleaning Bloodletter.

She stayed silent for a long moment. "You're here to get away from everyone. I can go if you prefer to be alone."

"I admit I did not expect anyone to follow me up here," he replied. "But you may stay if you wish. After all, it is your city, it is your wall."

Galra chuckled, before spinning and sitting down beside him. Her big eyes and slight smile, like many Gerudo girls', reminded him of Talm. "Do you think they're all right, out there?" she asked.

Talporom knew of whom she spoke. "I have faith they will return. They have never failed to come back to me, no matter how long they have been absent."

She lowered her eyes. "Must be nice to have that sort of surety. Nabru's the strongest person I know, and even I worry sometimes she won't come back."

"To fret about her is to doubt her abilities. She is capable, she is strong. So trust her."

Galra's lips, colored a slight purple, parted in a smile. "I suppose. It's not something I can help, though. She's been my closest friend for years. If I lost her, I don't know what I'd do."

"You have too little trust. Trust Nabru to return, and trust yourself to survive without her should she fail to."

The Gerudo put her long-nailed fingers to her temples and rubbed slowly. "You make it sound so easy."

"It is."

They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, watching the distant torches from the King's camp flicker in the night. It had been discouragingly quiet, and he could still entertain the hope that the King had died somewhere out in the desert and would not return to awaken the camp from its sleepy state. He knew it was too much to hope for; and besides, if the King died, undoubtedly Haema would march on the city out of sheer spite, burning all in his path. He knew how men like that operated.

"I'm curious," Galra said. He wondered if the young woman had followed his trail of thoughts to the King and his generals, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere entirely. "Is Palo your son?"

"Palo?" Talporom frowned. "In a sense, I suppose."

"So you're unrelated?"

"As unrelated as two people in a clan as small as ours can be."

Something like disappointment crossed her features. "He seems very much like a brother to your daughters. But now I see he's—"

In a wave of amusement, Talporom realized she must've been concerned for his availability. He interrupted her with a sound that almost counted as a laugh. "Are you planning on courting him? Did you come up here to ask for my blessing?"

Galra, usually so cool and pleased with herself, blushed desperately. "Of course not. A Gerudo woman does not ask for a parent's blessing. I believe a young man can make his own choices." She averted her gaze. "I was simply curious."

"Take my advice, Galra. And pass it on to any of your friends who may be interested in seducing him. Palo does not concern himself with such matters." She looked at him inquisitively, but without malice or distress. It pained him to find himself burdened with explaining the details of certain Sheikah sensibilities, but her frown was earnest, her concern genuine. "Palo is what my people call a _shirodi kauto'epan_ , a free spirit."

"A what?"

" _Shirodi kauto'epan._ In the old language, it means a soul without burdens. A person free from the worldly shackles that bind him to others."

"So he's taken a vow of celibacy or something?"

"No. No vows. Although some of us do, for reasons of our own. But Palo has never needed a vow. He has never needed to voice his reasons. There are no reasons. He simply is."

Galra's brows knit together. She opened her mouth, and Talporom prepared to equivocate away any questions she prepared, but something else caught his attention. Somewhere in the back of his mind, an alarm of recognition sounded, and he found himself standing, Bloodletter at his side. Galra mimicked his movements, following his eyes to the grounds below, near the barracks, where something more subtle than a shadow stirred.

"What is it?" Galra asked. She could not see what he did, which was expected. The caster of the shadow art was skilled enough.

"We have an unexpected visitor," he said. Galra gave him a worried look. "There is no danger; this is one of my own. You may follow me down if you can."

He sheathed Bloodletter over his back and stepped off the arch, falling a few feet before latching onto a bar of metal. He pushed off the side of the wall onto the lower battlements, sliding where he could, dangling when necessary. He could almost hear his joints creak as he made his way down the side of the wall. He was not as limber as he used to be, but no one who was not trained in Sheikah arts could tell.

But Galra kept up. She was a little more reserved with her movements, but it did not surprise him to see that she could swiftly and safely descend the wall—given she could climb it and walk along it on her palms with no problem. When Talporom landed on the intricate bricks that lined the roads of Obra Garud, Galra was quickly at his side, recovering her footing. Together, they walked toward the barracks, where the city's army was stationed in preparation for the King's inevitable raid.

Talporom slipped between two of the arched buildings, Galra close behind, and let out a soft whistle. He turned his head and glanced down the row of barracks, where he saw a small shadow move. A slight puff of sand was all he could see of his visitor, until she stepped out of the shadows, lifting a hand to greet him.

The woman was easily recognizable. Among Sheikah, she was a rarity—white-skinned, brown-eyed, black hair cut straight across her brow. The tattoo on her cheek shone all the brighter for her fair skin, but she had earned it just as any other Sheikah would. Her father theorized she had been a daughter of a plains tribesman, but the moment Sheim had picked her up and carried her to Kakariko, she was considered a full member of the clan.

"Elpi," Talporom breathed. "I thought you were supposed to be in Silk."

"I was, but I was reassigned as a messenger."

Talporom crossed his arms. There were few pieces of news important enough to necessitate a personal delivery.

Elpi glanced over at Galra, her dark eyes narrowing. "It is for your ears and yours alone."

Talporom nodded to the Gerudo, and she slipped away, pouting slightly. He took a moment to investigate his surroundings, ensuring no overeager guards or Gerudo townspeople stood close enough to hear their conversation. "Speak," he told her when he was certain they would not be overheard.

"My father sent word to Merel from the Capital."

"And?" A knot formed in the pit of Talporom's stomach. "Is it about Balras?"

"No. It's about someone much more important." Talporom's eyes widened, but Elpi corrected herself before he could come to too many conclusions. "About a _possible_ someone. Right now all we have to go on are rumors that a certain insurgent had a second child. We still haven't found her. Or him. My father is searching, but he has the authorities on his heels. It happens when you assassinate a couple dozen people in the span of a few weeks." She shrugged. Her casual disregard for the severity of her father's work almost charmed him. She knew what Sheim did best, and supported him regardless. Sheikah children were usually quite good at accepting the moral quandaries of their parents.

"Very well. I will send someone as soon as I can. Are you going to the Capital to help your father?"

Elpi shook her head. "Wherever this child is… _if_ the child exists, they are well hidden enough, considering even Sheim cannot find them. They will go nowhere. I was given orders to assist you in whatever way I can. Elder Merel says this matter is more pressing."

Talporom clasped her shoulder. "If the elder wishes it, you are welcome to stay. We could use more Sheikah faces around here."

"Always, we could use more Sheikah faces." She gave him a charming smile. "Now, I was promised there would be good food here in the city. Lead me to it, honorable Talporom, or I'll lay down and die right here."

Her shining eyes forced his thoughts to his own children. _Even with my own blood far away, I am surrounded by other men's daughters,_ he thought to himself. _Daughters of all colors and lineages._ He could not say he minded. He just motioned for Elpi to follow him, and made his way toward a well-lit boulevard, where Galra waited for them.

* * *

Link held a hand to his chest, as if he could quiet the heavy, breathless pants that seemed to echo louder than the commotion at the entrance. He followed Impa and the others back toward the dark passage from which they had come, but Impa skidded to a halt before they could throw themselves into it. Her eyes were locked on the stretch of wall beside the passage, where a thin outcropping of stone led up to the buttresses. It seemed too steep to function as a stairwell, but could've been something of a ladder up to the rafters for maintenance purposes, or to afford the ancient artists footholds when carving their designs into the stone arches. Impa looked it over, glanced up to the shadows around the ceiling, and motioned for them to follow her in silence. She sent them all a quick glance, as if requesting their consent to hide rather than flee, and when no one protested (at least not verbally), she gripped the first stone on the carved ladder and started to ascend.

The clambering was tough, but the rocky ladder provided enough purchase for them to pull themselves toward the shadows at the height of the pillars that lined the room. Something that looked like a water conduit stretched between the buttresses, sloping shallowly downward. It led toward the large statue at the far end of the chamber, and terminated in a small passage beside her arm. The Sheikah had no trouble balancing on the edges of this thin aqueduct, but Nabru, who could barely fit between the curve of the buttress and the wall as it was, seemed to be sure she would crack it beneath her massive feet. So instead of following the others along the duct to the other pillars, she settled herself on an outcropping of the column's chapiter nearest the stone ladder, pulling her spear behind her to hide its glint in the shadows. Link, heart in his throat when he saw nothing between him and the distant, rocky floor but a thin stone conduit, followed his companions into the farther arches, with a better view of the doorway. When he reached the buttress on which Impa crouched, the loud, dusty shuddering of the blocked entrance deepened. Link heard the crack of stone, the crush of mortar, and he slipped behind Impa with a sharp tinge of panic. He told himself to calm down, told his heart to cease its frantic palpitating, and sank into the safety of the shadows. He took a deep, silent breath, and watched.

It did not take long for the temple entrance to crumble in a shower of dust. When the powdery debris billowed into the chamber, golden afternoon light flooded the room. Link gripped Impa's arm (he was not sure why), and waited for any sign of the new visitors. It seemed an impossibly long few seconds before the tall, black shapes of the King's robed magicians emerged from the clouds of dust. Behind them, a thick shadow appeared, cape flowing like water. When the great sovereign stepped into the chamber, brushing dust off his wide shoulders, Link's breath abandoned him.

The King glanced around for a few seconds, eyes wandering from the goddess, to the altar, to the statues and pillars that lined the walls. For a brief, horrifying moment, his yellow irises passed over their hiding spot, but they did not linger. He strode forward purposefully, gaze locked at the goddess' crossed feet, and a small pack of thick-robed servants followed. He walked past the pillars, past Link and his companions, past the altar and its red covering, uninterested in anything but the statue.

One of the magicians lifted its covered, faceless head, as if to sniff at the air. "Sire, I smell a rat," it said, and from what little of the voice came echoing to Link's hiding spot, he could not tell if it was male or female, or something else entirely.

"Then seek it out," the King replied, without breaking his long stride.

The magician lifted its hands, long, gnarled fingers probing from the infinite folds of its robe like the feelers of some pale insect. It turned its body, muttering to itself, palms seeking out the source of its unease.

Link's heart pounded so loudly against his ribcage he was sure the magician could hear it. He wanted to lift a hand to muffle its deafening drumming, but he just crouched, petrified, breathless. From the corner of his eye he saw Impa's fingers weave a complex symbol into the air before her.

What would've been the magician's face, had it not been entirely obscured under a dark robe, lifted to the buttresses among which they hid. Its gaze (if one could call it that) settled on their location, and its pale palms lifted toward them. Link tightened his grip on Impa, but she continued to draw furiously in the air. The chill of shadow magic crept up Link's spine as she completed her spell and cloaked them in it.

The magician hesitated for a moment—if Link was correct about the intention of Impa's nonverbal incantation, the object of its interest must've momentarily disappeared. It curled its long-nailed fingers in what may have been confusion, but it did not take its face from the buttresses. Only when something at the base of the pillars caught its eye did it turn its attention from them.

A white fox, wide-eared and small, scurried frantically from the shadows, sharp claws clicking on the stone mosaics. It hastened past the magician, who let out something between a hiss and a cry of surprise, and with a terrified flick of its bushy tail, disappeared into the sunlit debris at the temple entrance. The magician watched the animal scuttle to the safety of the temple's portico, and after glancing suspiciously once more in Link's direction, he turned to follow his ruler. Evidently he was willing to accept the sand fox as the source of the irregular smell that had piqued his suspicion.

Link's heart did not slow, but he quietly, cautiously released the breath he'd held during that short ordeal. He silently thanked the fox for its diversion, and closed his eyes for a moment in relief before returning his attention to the King.

He stood at the feet of the goddess, stroking his beard thoughtfully. His soldiers and magicians lingered at his side, long robes dotted with the dust of the temple. He stared at the statue for a few minutes in silence, before he stepped up to her feet and touched her. He ran his fingers along her toes, gripped her anklet for a handhold and hoisted himself up onto her crossed legs. He stood tall, one foot on an ankle, the other on her knee, and stared at the curve of her stomach for a few moments before crossing his arms and laughing to himself. His chuckle was low and restrained, but the potent silence of the temple coaxed it to the highest roof beams. "Of course," the King said. He stepped forward, right hand outstretched, and lay his fingers on the fold of the statue's trousers where her legs spread from her torso. He muttered something incomprehensible, hand still laid gently on the stone, until a large rumbling echoed throughout the chamber. He lifted his head, retracted his hand and stepped off the statue's legs, landing at its base in a billow of black cloak.

Link's heart skipped a beat when the rumbling made its way up the buttresses, threatening to shake him loose, but Impa gripped him tight. He sent a glance over to the others to see if they were all right—Nabru was still wedged uncomfortably between the column and the wall, Palo and Talm held fast, as any decent Sheikah could.

Down below, the scraping of stone and the light tapping of falling pebbles quieted. Link strained to see, leaning, Impa tightening her hold on his arm. He dangled dangerously close to the clear sightline of the King and his men, but they seemed sufficiently distracted by the base of the statue. A short, thick shadow had appeared on the wide plinth supporting her, and the King knelt before it. He raised a dark hand to motion to his magicians before he disappeared entirely into the statue's base. One by one, his men followed suit.

They were again alone in the massive chamber. Link released a breath he did not notice he held, and turned to Impa, only to see she was quickly, silently motioning to her Sheikah companions behind the adjacent pillar. Despite the absence of the King and his magicians, she seemed adamant that they should remain silent; her frantic motions described as much.

Link watched her hands carefully, interpreting the subtle motions of her open palms, and of her finger following the length of the thin aqueduct to the far wall. Palo and Talm nodded; from what Link could gather, they had agreed to wait in the main chamber while Impa investigated where the King had gone. She gently prodded Link to follow, and crouched on the dry conduit. She sprang from her hiding place and ran along the aqueduct, silent, quick and low.

Link tried his best to emulate her, but each beat of his foot on the stone sounded like an alarm in his head, each glimpse in his peripheral vision of the height between him and the floor set his heart in frantic knots. He kept his arms to his sides, and his eye trained on his destination, and through some miracle or another, he slid to a halt behind Impa on the far wall.

To his left sat the goddess, her stone shoulder close enough he could've reached out and touched it. Before him, the small aqueduct fed into a tunnel in the wall, screened by an intricate grate of metal. It would be a tight fit, but he and Impa could crawl through, if they could manage to remove the brass partition. Impa knelt before the tunnel and unsheathed her knife, wedging it between the grate and the stone that surrounded it, prying one portion loose, then another. Before Link could even offer to help, she sheathed her knife and gripped the metal screen, fingers curling around the floral designs, and pulled. It came loose from the wall with a heavy, short creak, and she froze, listening to its echo for any signs of response. She handed the grate to Link when she heard no indications of the King's men, and he lay it gently and quietly down on the conduit behind them. Without hesitation, and perhaps without knowing whether or not this small passage would lead them to wherever the King had disappeared, she entered the shadows.

The tunnel was long, straight, and terminated in another intricate grate. A dim, orange light shone through it, lighting the farthest portions of the tunnel, and Link crawled up to it, narrowing his eyes. When he pressed himself against the metal, he saw the shapes of the King and his company far below, and he didn't know whether to be relieved or terrified at the constancy of Impa's baffling intuition. He again found himself holding his breath, in case any of the magicians below him lifted their eyes to the grate in the wall. His hands trembled slightly, so he balled them into fists at his sides. He grit his teeth and surveyed what he could of the room below him.

The aqueduct curved around the edge of the circular room, winding its way down to the center, where a statue of a snake's head loomed, mouth open. It boasted eyes of sapphire, and below its curled stone lip, four fangs of ivory. The aqueduct disappeared behind the statue, only to reemerge as its tongue, terminating in a delicate stone fork between its lower teeth. Below the dry conduit, under the snake's watchful protection, lay a pool of bright, clear water. While everything in the room had collected a thick layer of dust, the small oasis, lined in bright tiles, glinted clean and fresh.

The rest of the room seemed to fade and disappear when Link stared at the water. The King and his men, too, seemed enticed by its shining surface. The sovereign stepped up to the pool's edge, where he knelt. Link thought he might've wanted to inspect the water more closely, but something about the way he lowered his head reminded Link of genuflection. The King did not touch the water—instead he lifted his right hand above his head, open-palmed, and began to speak.

Link could not understand what came from his mouth, but the throaty lulls and the musical, deep tone told him it was Gerudo. His magicians stood by in silence, watching him closely, as he recited what must've been the longest incantation Link had ever heard. Granted, he'd only encountered the curt, elegant spells of the Sheikah, and had watched the lips of the King's mages when they performed their duties back at the palace, but the King's invocation seemed to last for minutes on end. He did not seem to take a breath between stanzas of the chant; he held his hand high, almost glowing gold.

Link pressed his eye up to the grate when he noticed the water move. Small ripples appeared from its center, glinting silver, rising higher with each syllable the King uttered. It foamed and curled under him, almost moving to the rhythm of his chant. With a low, conclusive growl, the King finished his songlike spell.

The water seemed to burst open. Droplets flew from the pool, suspended in the thick air, and steam curled up past the stone snake's forked tongue. The round drops and bright streams of water that flung from the oasis hardened, floating like specters in the light. They thickened, sharpening into ice, before flinging themselves at the King's men.

Some of the magicians raised barriers in time to save themselves, others, pierced through by the uncanny slivers of ice, fell to the stone floor and did not rise again. The King stood at the water's edge, unconcerned with his men struggling against the barrage of frozen bullets. He just stared into the water as the cries of his magicians died down, the survivors pulling themselves to their feet once more. The pool rippled almost angrily now, steam rising, circling the room in a thin haze.

A hand, bejeweled and long-nailed, broke the surface of the water. It rose, slowly, fingers curling, followed by a shapely brown arm. Water seemed to cloak the skin as it emerged, falling diaphanous over shoulders, breasts, hips and ankles. Long red hair intricately braided, eyes golden bright, cloaked in ice and steam and wearing a smile that could entice a heart or stop it entirely, emerged a woman.


	36. The Last Witch of the Colossus

"We are all born of woman's blood. Blood is a ritual performed under the light of the changing moon; a harbinger of womanhood. A bloodstained woman is a natural woman."

Gerudo Warrior's Creed

* * *

Link's lungs twisted inside him. He could feel Impa tense at his side, preparing herself to fight or flee, but he could not tear his eyes away from the person who had emerged from the water. The icy needles she had summoned from her oasis sparkled around her like jewels, hovering in the dusty air. The mist from her pool cloaked her shoulders like a robe, and the jewelry on her wrists and throat seemed as much a part of her as her long red hair. When her body had risen entirely from the water, clothed in nothing but steam and shining gold, she appeared to hover above it, toes barely touching the surface. Her eyes stayed locked with the King's, and her large, colored lips opened slowly to speak.

The words echoed through the chamber like music, sending a chill down Link's spine, but he could not understand them. He squinted, trying to extract meaning from the shapes of her curled lip, from the movement of her eyes, streaked heavily in black and gold. She spoke slowly to the King, in deep, tonal Gerudo, and even when she paused to gesture or take a breath, he did not reply. He stood in silence before her, almost deferential, as she said something that seemed to frighten his magicians.

The King did not take his eyes off hers as she raised her hand, twitching her finger almost imperceptibly. The needles of ice at her side disappeared with a harrowing whistle, plunging into the throats and faces of the King's men. They fell in silence, crumpling to the floor in a flurry of dark robes, but their sovereign did not seem to notice or care.

The woman extended her hand to him, bent elegantly at the wrist, rings and bracelets shining. The King took it gently in his, and kneeling, pressed his lips against it. The woman's smile spread, and taking her eyes off the man before her, raised them to the screen above the aqueduct. Her golden irises shone brightly, hovering over the shadows that covered Link. She twitched one eyebrow briefly, almost playfully, telling him with no hint of uncertainty that she knew he watched.

When her yellow gaze met his, a paralyzing, freezing pain swept from his heart outward. He clutched at his chest, gritting his teeth against the cry that threatened to billow up his throat and out his mouth. But Impa's strong hand wrapped around his arm, pulling him back, away from the grate, away from the woman on the other side. When she dragged him from that petrifying golden stare, his heart thawed, his breath returned, and he found the strength to chase after Impa.

He could almost feel the woman's eyes on his back as he scrambled through the darkness. He could almost feel her gaze pierce the stone between him and that enchanted pool, following him as he fled, too slowly, through the tunnel. As he struggled toward the distant light, he half expected the small passage to flood with angry steam or needles of ice, or the sound of musical, witchlike laughter.

Link burst from the darkness as if from deep water. He gasped, dusty air filling his lungs, as he tripped after Impa, stumbling through the golden light of the temple's main chamber. His heart skipped a few beats when he accidentally kicked the grating they had left sitting on the conduit. It spun from the stone, and for an infinite second it hovered in midair, turning like a tossed coin, before hitting the floor with a deafening clatter. All was still for a second—Impa turned and widened her eyes at him, and he could see Palo and Talm's shapes emerge from the shadows by the walls. Impa stilled for half a second, lips pursed in thought, before deciding their course of action. She motioned for the others to come down from the buttresses, and signaled the command to flee.

She launched herself from the aqueduct in silence, landing on the nearer arm of the goddess. Her strong hands gripped the ledges of its jewelry, and she barely slowed her fall before she pushed off and rolled safely to the floor. Link followed, fearfully, clumsily, kicking off the conduit and grasping the statue's arm. He managed to push himself forward, dropping onto one of her crossed legs before he jumped to the floor, copying Impa's roll and launching himself after her.

As he sprinted past the altar, he glanced behind him, to the shallow door at the statue's base. He saw no sign of activity, no indication that the King or the terrifying woman would emerge from it. Link did not want to think about those needles of ice flying into his throat, or the burning steam of that chamber crawling out to wrap around him. He just followed Impa, praying that no one heard the racket he'd made, hoping that the woman hovering over the water hadn't told the King that their ritual had attracted a couple uninvited spectators.

Talm and Palo dropped to the floor in silence, and Nabru tumbled in a clang of armor and obscenities. She landed unharmed, but with a louder racket than Link had made with the aqueduct's gate. He sprinted past her, giving her a hurrying look, and within a few seconds they had made it to the entryway of the temple. Link rushed through without looking behind him; he did not want to see if the King had followed the sound of metal on stone, did not want to see the shadow of the man at the base of the goddess.

He and his companions flew out onto the open portico, only to find a pair of well-armed soldiers guarding the door. After the initial shock of seeing a whole host of strangers fly from the entrance in a wave of panic, the men lowered their spears and chased them across the stone court. Palo turned, and dodging a powerful thrust of the first guard's spear, lifted a foot and kicked him in the soft spot between his helmet and breastplate. He drew his knife to finish him off as the guard's partner ran toward them, weapon raised.

He didn't get two steps before Nabru's spear, heavy-tipped and bending with the motion of her arm, met the guard at the neck. With a harrowing crunch, the blade ripped through mail and met flesh, sending the guard flying at least half a dozen feet before his head even left his body.

Palo stood stunned for a moment, knife still in the throat of his own adversary, before he grunted in approval and swept after his companions. He leapt from the stone portico and onto the soft sand, following the others into the desert, toward the oasis where there horses waited. They had not gone a few hundred feet from the temple when Impa suddenly slowed. Link skidded to a halt by her side, and followed her gaze to the hurried footprints they had left in the sand.

"Keep running," Impa told him. She shoved him with her elbow as she drew her lyre from her back. "Ready my horse and I'll catch up." He knew better than to disobey, and fell into step with Nabru, glancing behind him to see her run her hand across her instrument. A terrible, thick sound emanated from the harp, and a massive billow of sand swirled up from the ground like a dark cloud. Impa stepped away from it, strumming, coaxing more sand into the air, covering their tracks and enveloping the area in a thick haze. She turned and stumbled after them, occasionally plucking a few more billows of her sandstorm, and when she was sure she had summoned enough to cover their trail, turned and sprinted after him. She caught up to them easily with her long strides, feet kicking up dust. No one spoke, no one looked back—the only sounds that accompanied them were the quick, desperate puffs of their hurried breath, the creaking of Nabru's boiled leather and the whistle of Impa's little sandstorm raging behind them.

Link's lungs burned with exhaustion, his legs shook, his mouth was dry and tasted of sand, but when they reached the oasis, there was no time to rest or drink. They stumbled to their horses, fumbling to untie them. The animals snorted, surprised at the sudden, chaotic entrance, but did not complain as their riders threw themselves on their backs and kicked them toward the Haunted Waste.

"What are we going to do about a guide?" Talm called over the rush of wind.

"We'll find one once we get there," Impa answered. She looked over to Palo, and he widened his eyes at her, frowning. Link recognized the doubt in his face, but he said nothing as he followed Impa, kicking his horse to the edge of the dark, haunted sands. They maintained their deep silence as they descended, directionless, into the Waste.

* * *

"What in all the goddesses' names went wrong back there?" Talm demanded.

The winds were cold and sharp, sand obscuring the sky as night fell. Palo sat a few yards away from them, legs crossed, palms turned up, muttering. He had not yet found a ghostly dragoman, but they were far enough into the Waste Impa was sure the King could not follow them.

"We were seen," Impa replied. She removed a large flagon of water from her horse's side and drank deeply from it.

"And here I had faith that you lot were subtle," Nabru grunted. She leaned on her spear and watched Palo sit and murmur to himself a few paces away.

"We made no mistake I could gather," Impa said. "Well, at least not until we came back out." The clamor of the grate falling to the floor filled Link's ears, and he reddened.

"You sure flew out of there," Talm said, folding her arms across her chest. "Did the King see you?"

"No. No, it was his… it was…" Impa raised her eyes, as if she could find the correct word somewhere in the sky. "It was a woman who rose from the water."

Nabru turned her head, eyes wide, pulling her spear from the sand and approaching to better hear the conversation.

" _What_?" Talm almost laughed. "Who rose from where?"

"There was a room beyond the statue."

"Well, we figured _that_."

Impa ignored her sister's interruptions. "And in that room was a pool. He seemed to summon her from the water."

"What was her name?" Nabru had joined the interrogation.

"I didn't catch everything she said." Impa closed her eyes, brow furrowing. Link certainly couldn't help her—the only meaning he had gleaned from the conversation were the woman's strange motions, facial expressions, and twists of her wrist as she summoned her magic. And even then, all he'd figured was that apparently she did not mind the presence of the King, but had some sort of grudge against his underlings. "My Gerudo is less than great," Impa continued, "but she said… if I heard right, she said she had been sleeping for a long time… and she does not enjoy waking up to unworthy company, or bad company, or… maybe just 'the company of men.'"

"They are generally one and the same," Nabru quipped, as if she couldn't help it despite the circumstances.

"And then she killed the King's magicians."

"What, just like that?" Talm snapped her finger.

"Yes. She drove them through with ice from her pool."

"Ice," Nabru muttered.

Talm's eyes widened. "Well, that explains why you were in such a hurry. And what happened to the King?"

"I don't know," Impa answered.

Link recalled the way the woman's golden eyes danced when she looked at the sovereign, the way he lifted his hand toward hers. "I don't think she means him harm."

"How would you know?" Talm demanded.

"He kissed her hand; she spared his life," Impa answered for him. "If that doesn't constitute some sort of deranged alliance, I don't know what would."

"We must tell Ahnadib of this," Nabru said. She started to pace. "Yes, she would very much like to know."

Impa turned her gaze to Link as Nabru muttered to herself. "So, that metal we found…" Link knew she wished to speak of its relation to the scrap they discovered on Eldin's peak, but couldn't. He nodded in understanding. "That was not his goal."

"Why would it be?" Talm said. "It's just junk. And look where you found it. On the sacrificial table? Goddesses above, who knows how many throats it's slit."

Link had to admit the likelihood of Talm's theory. Though he did not quite know the purpose and history of the temple on Eldin's peak, he was at least familiar with one story about the Colossus. He wondered if the metal had played a part in killing the linguist whose ghost had led them across the Waste.

"Hurry up!" Nabru shouted. He looked over at her to see her with her hands on her hips, leaning toward Palo. "This place is infamous for being haunted, how hard can it be to find one goddamn ghost?" He didn't respond; he didn't even seem to notice Nabru's increasingly aggressive shouts.

Impa gripped the giant's elbow sternly. "You can't hurry something like that," she said. "We need to rest while we can, unless you want the horses to die under us on the way back. He will find a guide soon."

"He'd better, unless he wants me to smack some haste into him." Her frown darkened, but when she saw that Palo was not hurrying (and unlikely to start), she sighed and slid to the ground, crossing her legs. "Tell me more about this woman you saw in the temple."

Impa related all that had happened, never missing a beat in the narrative where Link could jump in and contribute—the woman rising from the water, what Impa could make out of her words, the way she looked up at them as if she'd known from the beginning they were watching her. She did not mention an ice-cold feeling spreading from her heart when the stranger held her gaze, but Link was not sure if even he'd felt that unexplainable sensation, now that the ordeal was behind him.

It was difficult to tell the time of night when Palo returned to them, eyes ringed with fatigue, claiming to have found a guide. "This one can take us to the edge of the Waste," he said. "She says she knows the fastest way."

"Good," Impa replied, and wasted no time mounting her horse. "Ask her if she knows anything about the Colossus witches."

"Is _that_ what you saw beyond the statue?" Palo frowned.

"Perhaps. We can't be sure."

Palo closed his eyes for a moment, mouth moving slightly. "She knows nothing. She died looking for wormsilk. She never made it to the other side."

"Pity you can't summon the first man," Nabru said. "I'm sure he'd have a thing or two to say about what he saw in the Colossus before he died."

"He told me all he could," Palo answered, pulling himself onto his horse. "He was blindfolded most of the time. Hell, who knows, it could've been whoever you saw beyond the goddess statue that ate him."

Link's stomach turned. " _Ate_ him?"

"Did I not mention that before?" He shrugged at Link's stare. "Well, _someone_ did. You should've seen his torso. It looked like the boar we cut up at the winter festival." Link tried to imagine the scenario, and couldn't. Palo watched his face contort in disgust, wearing the beginnings of a morbid smile. "Well, don't look so offended. I'm sure he tasted just fine."

"Palo, we're in a hurry," Impa reminded him.

He shook his head and nudged his horse forward, closing his eyes and letting his tattoos and whatever lay beyond them guide him back through the wasteland.

* * *

"It's quiet."

It did not need to be said. It was clear enough how unnaturally still the sands of Wormhaven lay under the white sun. The grey dunes were silent for miles—there were no waves, no shifts of sand, no distant rumbling of wormtracks. The horses seemed relieved to find the land free of predators, but Nabru's mare, used to the area, appeared to be nervous about the sudden change of atmosphere. It snorted in protest when she urged it down toward the dark sands, but obeyed.

Link and the others followed their Gerudo guide across the empty land, waiting for the unmistakable sound of a rumbling worm, but the ground remained unmoving for miles. Link pushed his horse onward, up to Nabru's side, carefully preparing his questions for her.

Talm saved him the trouble. "What the hell happened here?"

"I don't know," Nabru answered. "I've never seen it like this. There are always a few… at least a couple, here and there…"

There weren't many things that could've changed since the last time they had traversed Wormhaven. "Do you think—" Link started.

"It was that witch," Nabru said. "I know it. Somehow, she…" the Gerudo did not seem to have any idea where she was going with her accusation, but she seemed sure of its veracity.

"All right then," Palo started. "Let's say she did this. Let's say she emptied this place of worms, all from a distance. Now we're stuck with the questions of how and why. Both unanswerable."

"Exactly," Impa muttered, but her sister seemed to latch onto the idea that the witch—or whatever she was—had somehow managed to clear out the miles of land between the Waste and Obra Garud.

"What sort of person could do something like this?" Talm's voice was soft, but echoed across the empty landscape like a shout. "Did she scare them all off?"

"She couldn't have," Nabru answered. "Worms fear nothing."

"We know nothing about what happened here," Impa reminded them. "And we're wasting time speculating. Meanwhile gods know what our enemies are doing." Her inflections were confident and firm, as usual, but Link could hear the waver of anxiety in her voice. "We should take advantage of the circumstances and hurry through Wormhaven. Maybe we'll come across a few later on."

They didn't. As they rode quickly and silently, the landscape did not change. The dark sands rose and fell as lifelessly and gradually as any other windswept dune in the vast desert. It appeared the worms had taken their roaring and rumbling elsewhere, leaving only empty stillness.

It was as if their entire journey across Wormhaven was one silent, held breath. It wasn't until they reached the eastern edge of the dark sands that any of them could release the sighs they didn't know they held inside them. When they stopped for the night, halfway between Wormhaven and Obra Garud, their little camp was desperately quiet. Nabru knelt at its edge and lowered her head to the sand, praying fervently in Gerudo. Link heard Molgera's name invoked more than once; he didn't know what sort of pleas Nabru sent to her armored goddess, but she seemed fervent—distraught, even. He supposed it shouldn't shock him to see such a steadfast adherent lament the ejection of her spiritual sisters from their sacred land, but it still made him shiver a little to see a woman so strong entreat a higher power so vehemently.

Link spent most of the night dividing his attention between eavesdropping on Nabru's ardent invocations and focusing on the conversation between Palo and the sisters, who all had their own ideas about what had happened at the Colossus.

"Clearly that woman has something of value to the King," Impa muttered between bites of cured meat. "Otherwise, he wouldn't have wandered that far into the desert."

"If she's one of those infamous witches, you'd suspect he wanted to learn some magic, or at least ask her for some," Palo suggested. "Though if that's the case he's probably dead."

"Why do you say that?"

"He's a man," Palo continued. "A particularly masculine one at that. You've seen—well, _I've_ seen what those witches have done to men. At least, to that linguist who led us across the Waste." He inadvertently pulled a strip of meat from Link's hand and took a thoughtful bite. "You said she killed his magicians—she probably wouldn't stop there. She might've taunted him for a little while, let him flatter her, but I bet you she ate his liver when she was done with him."

"What is it with you and cannibalism?" Talm asked.

He shrugged. "The linguist told me that's how the Colossus witches made offerings. The nameless goddess lives inside all her worshippers, and to put a sacrifice on the altar, so to speak, you've got to eat it." He finished Link's jerky and reached for another one. Link let him, since his appetite had waned for some reason.

"As nice as it would be to have the King die of his own accord," Impa started, "he's no idiot. We have to assume he knew what he was doing when he traveled to the Colossus."

They nodded in agreement. Link took advantage of the silence and cleared his throat. "The King talked about… before he left for the desert, he talked about magic. About the wind… and souls, and being lost. The desert called to him, or something. I don't remember."

"Surely you'd recall the crazier things he said," Palo half-smiled.

Link shook his head. "He… he said a lot of things. He talked a lot. Sometimes in Gerudo. I didn't understand everything."

"And I don't understand anything," Talm sighed. "All this desert magic, and redead witches and missing worms. I just want to sleep."

Impa glanced over to Nabru, who continued to kneel and mumble, long braid curling by her elbow in the sand. "Whatever is happening, the best thing we can do is get back to Obra Garud and tell the others about it. I just have this feeling…" She fell silent, words evaporating into the night, replaced by a thoughtful frown.

Link looked at Palo's concerned scowl, then at Talm's perfectly plucked brow furrowing in sleepy anxiety. It was easy for any of them to guess Impa's feelings. It was much harder to doubt them.

* * *

Ahnadib did not appear pleased. Then again, she never really did—Link could not recall ever seeing the woman smile, but the way she cupped her chin and furrowed her eyebrows seemed even more solemn and troubled than usual. Talporom, flanked by Galra and a white-skinned Sheikah Link had never met, wore the same look, crossing and uncrossing his arms almost impatiently.

Nabru took one knee before her employer, staring at the gilded feet poking from her long, billowing dress, and recited to her all they had learned in the desert. Ahnadib just stroked her second chin, jewelry jingling, frown widening with each turn of events. When the tale of their encounter with the woman inside the Colossus' temple arose, Ahnadib had to interrupt her subordinate.

"He found _what?_ " The intensity of her tone forced Talporom to shoot her a concerned glance. Galra, too, seemed to pale at the news Nabru conveyed.

"You know the Colossus has been abandoned for more than a century, mistress," Nabru said. She kept her face serious, free from fear. "But these two—" she motioned to Link and Impa—"saw a woman rise from a pool of water, very much alive. She responded to the summons of that coward King of theirs. Apparently she killed his underlings with blades of ice, but left him unharmed."

"So we have a rova on our hands?" Ahnadib asked.

"Maybe. But that's not the worst part. When we rode through Wormhaven on our way back, it was completely silent. Not a worm in sight."

Ahnadib's face contorted, her jaw flexed, and she bit the inside of her lip. She tapped her fingers furiously against the arm of her ornate chair. "What sort of witch…"

"I don't know, mistress." Nabru lifted her head. "Do you think Ganondorf will bring this witch back with him when he returns?"

"We cannot afford to doubt it. Whether he sought her alliance or merely her teachings, we cannot say. But we must assume the worst." She turned to Talporom. "Does this change our preparations?"

The Sheikah cupped his chin. "Somewhat. I'll discuss things with you later." His red eyes settled on his daughters and their companions, noting their wind-burned complexions, the fatigue in their stances, the smell of sweat and horses wafting from them. "For now, we should let the travelers rest. They have done well to bring us this information."

"Very well. But we will have to gird our loins if we want to survive the coming battle with our city intact." She dismissed them with a wave of her hand.

Outside Ahnadib's house, in the warm shadows of her intricate wooden screens, they could greet one another informally. Talmporom embraced his daughters, nearly lifting them from the ground with his large arms, before his light-skinned companion approached, laying a hand on Impa's shoulder.

"How long has it been?" she asked.

"Years, possibly. We never seem to find ourselves in the same city at the same time." Impa returned the gesture, smiling. "It's good to see you are well, Elpi."

"You too. And Talm, baby Talm, come here." Talm reluctantly let the woman embrace her, wearing a frustrated scowl. Elpi mussed her curly hair, dislodging her bun, and when she let go, Talm retreated, gathering her locks in her hands and replacing them.

It never failed to surprise Link how quickly Sheikah could switch from their emotionless scowls to warm smiles when the eyes of the world moved elsewhere. They shed their dispassionate, invulnerable frowns and dropped the formal language, exchanging clasps of hands and quips and embraces. Link only counted himself lucky that he was thought of as Sheikah enough to witness a display of affection other races and peoples rarely, if ever, could see.

Talporom approached him and Palo, grasping their shoulders tightly. "And again the gentlemen return alive, despite my daughters' best efforts," he said. A rare smile passed over his lips. "All of you probably have much you want to talk about, but we can do that after you clean yourselves up. Ahnadib has lent us a private residence. It is not far—you probably want good food and a long rest. And you will no doubt make good use of its bathing rooms. You all smell terrible."


	37. The Coming Storm

"'Do you feel that rumbling?' the old crone asked. She lifted her gnarled hand to the moonlit window. 'Do you sense the coming maelstrom? Do you hear that shifting of sand? Deep beneath the earth, miles below where you stand; that is the sound of a worm turning.'"

Etran Olrani, "The Little Gerudo Girl," from _Ordish Children's Stories_

* * *

Impa stared at her folded hands, brown in the firelight, counting her scars. She barely listened to the flurry of multilingual conversation around her. Pidgin Hylian, Gerudo, and a wealth of rarer desert dialects bounced around the chamber unheeded. Her father, Ahnadib, and a host of councilwomen and commanders stood over a table, looking down on the large plan of the double-walled city, arguing, agreeing, gesturing. Palo and Elpi stood behind Talporom, silently watching the motions of his fingers as he traced escape routes from the city. He illustrated where scouts were to be posted on both walls, and what to do should the King's army manage to breach the outer bulwark.

"They won't be able to," one confident Gerudo commander put in. She had a wide stance and the musculature of a circus strongman. She did not seem to be interested in the possibility of retreat.

" _If_ they do," Talporom tried again, "we should take care to fortify the council hall—the whole district. Food should be stored, weapons stockpiled—"

"What of evacuation?" someone asked. "We don't have room to fit all the people from the outer districts behind the inner wall."

Someone suggested opening up the catacombs as a sanctuary for civilians, and most laughed at him. They all knew any Gerudo would rather die at the end of an enemy's blade than from the slow, painful poison of giant vipers and other long-fanged monsters rumored to live beneath the city.

A soldier suggested something that sparked a heated argument between two councilwomen, but it had been so heavily accented Impa had not understood it. _As usual, I contribute nothing,_ she thought, folding and unfolding her hands.

Someone said something about the state of the citizenry; about how they would not obey orders to evacuate or relocate when they did not even believe that the Hyrulean King, who had lingered so idly outside Obra Garud for so long, would even attack the city. Another asked what they could do about the men and women who had raised pulpits on street corners and claimed the King had every right to their city, being the only living descendent of their last true king, Ganond. Another council member expressed grave concerns about the inevitable looting when the battle started. With each answer, ten more questions emerged, and the prattling and bickering continued.

Link had uninvited himself from the meeting when he promised a couple of passing Gerudo children that he would help them find their cat. Impa knew he'd probably return with no cat and likely no purse (and, miraculously, no heightened sense of suspicion—she was not sure if he even had a hint of that necessary cynicism in him), but she bid him farewell and good luck and sent him on his way, deliberately sparing him the boredom of the meeting. She rested her chin on her fist and thought of what she'd say to him (if anything) about what her father had told her.

"It is important I tell you now, while I have a moment of peace," Talporom had said. "I don't know when I will get another chance." She was so fresh out of the large marble baths of their temporary abode the steam was still rolling off her skin. It did not seem a good time to have a serious conversation, but the way her father dragged her out of sight, into the shadows of the building's far halls, took her mind from her bare feet and damp bathing robe. She just followed him to the palm-shaded loggia, into the quiet air of the coming night. She spied a few people on a balcony across from them, but they did not seem interested in eavesdropping on a half-naked stranger, since they appeared to be locked in a passionate kiss.

Impa focused her attention on her father, who seemed equally unconcerned with her disheveled state. "Elpi brought some news from the Capital," he said.

Impa's heart hastened a little. She wondered what information could possibly come from that smoke-choked city. Perhaps word of Balras, or of the small group of ineffectual insurrectionists they had allied with in the past, or Link…

"It appears there may have been another child born of the man you and Palo were sent to follow."

"Wait…" Impa started, pausing to collect her thoughts. "You mean Nohansen?" He nodded, and her eyes widened. "Did he survive the raid on his house? I wasn't there when they—"

"He's dead. Long dead. It's been confirmed many times over. But shortly before he died, a woman, the wife of another man, may have conceived by him."

Impa's heart fluttered somewhere in her throat. "Does that mean…"

"It remains unsubstantiated. Do not get too hopeful."

"How… how did we not know this before?" she asked, then cupped her chin in thought. "If his lover was already a married woman, it makes sense that they would try to keep it as secret as possible…"

"That's one reason. There was also the fact that we already knew he had a healthy daughter, almost grown. We had to focus on her."

The girl's face flashed through Impa's mind, her determined but troubled features, the noble way she hid her fear when dashing through the shadows of the palace. Something inside her started to ache. She lowered her eyes and her father gripped her shoulder.

"I am telling this to you and you alone, because I do not want the rumor to spread too widely. Should it prove false, it would be a blow to morale that we do not need. But you are the person I can trust most to responsibly bear that information." She lifted her eyes to his. "I do not need the others distracted by this revelation. You, of all of them, are the most realistic; you will keep or divulge the news with prudence, I trust."

"I… what are we to do about this?" Impa asked.

"What are we to do? Keep Obra Garud from falling. Keep the Territories out of the hands of the King. Secure the safety of our allies and the citizens of this land. When that is done, we may worry about this child."

Impa pulled her robe tighter around her chest, but she did not know whether it was to keep it from slipping off or to try to muffle the loud beating of her heart.

"Now, go dry yourself properly," Talporom said. "There's work to do around here."

She had said nothing to anyone about it. Granted, she hadn't had much time, with all the preparation, fortification and organization that had to be done around the city. She had simply put herself to work, helping her father arm all capable combatants, ensure the safety of their food supply, and the compliance of the citizenry. She had done her best to make herself useful, but when it came to these meetings of strategy… well, she was very much sure her presence was wasted.

She knew she should've paid attention. She knew she should accept any opportunity to learn about all elements of warfare—battles were won on tables and with pawns, not with the skilled swordsmanship on which she prided herself. She knew in another time, when her people were more numerous, they had room for specialization. _We are spread so thin_ , she thought, instead of focusing on the argument over the table. _Now each one of us must do the job of three or four._ No wonder the infamous perfectionism of her tribe was deteriorating. And she wasn't helping it. She was helping nothing.

She stood, and no one noticed. They were so engrossed in the complexity of the city's problems, they did not turn when Impa silently crept to the door and released herself into the hallway. She walked down the sunlit hall, eyes fixed on the geometric designs of pink marble spanning the floor. She knew she wasn't doing much good in that dark room anyway—surely they would forgive her absence if she found something more valuable to do with her time. She wondered where Link could be, and if he had found that (probably nonexistent) cat the Gerudo children had tricked him into searching for. She rebuked herself for having forgotten to take his purse from him before he dashed off. But that was fine—they had everything they needed at the luxurious residence Ahnadib had lent to them. He would not need coin to buy food or a bed anytime in the near future.

When she reached the end of the hall, she noticed a dilute shadow dance on the wall across from her. She turned and saw Palo trotting silently down the hall after her, so she waited for him, arms crossed. "Bored too?" he asked.

"I think Talm is right to skip these sorts of affairs," Impa admitted. "None of them are worth attending."

"For _her,_ maybe not. But your father thinks you can learn a thing or two from them." Palo fell into stride beside her as they made their way down the lengthy stairs of the council building and toward the large, intricate doors.

Impa sighed. She did not need to tell Palo that she learned nothing from any of them. "Give me someone to cut, and I will. Give me something to steal, and I will. But I cannot stand the pointless meandering of the tacticians' tables. I think I am far more useful elsewhere."

"Me too. We all are. But _someone_ has to endure that boredom." He sighed. "Let's let Talporom do it for now, I suppose. He seems to enjoy it well enough."

When they reached the front gate, they walked unhindered past the guards and into the street. Instinctively, Impa headed in the direction of their residence, Palo beside her. "Hey," he started. "We should take advantage of the baths while we still can. I have this feeling in my gut this might be our last chance before the inevitable siege."

She couldn't say she disagreed with his instinct. It had been a few days since they had returned to Obra Garud—no doubt the King had marched triumphantly back into his camp by now. Either he was busy making preparations to take the city, or he was already marching toward it. The scouts on the outer walls would spread the word of that circumstance—hopefully she would be clean and relaxed by then. She would have her sword and mind sharpened and ready.

"I could use a good soak," she admitted.

After they had wound their way back through the streets and to their residence, after the water had been piped from the boiling brass tanks into the large marble tubs of the building's baths, Impa floated on her back, staring at the ceiling. Palo lounged half-submerged on the other side of the pool, arms spread, towel draped over his face.

"Reminds me of the hot springs at home," came the muffled sound of his contented voice.

There was no smell of pine and minerals, no whisper of the high mountain winds through bending trees, no lovely contrast of the cold air with the hot water. But there was the pleasant scent of sandalwood and perfume, and the afternoon light spilling through the glassless windows glowed pinkish-gold against the marble. It was nothing like Kakariko, but it was certainly satisfying.

Palo lifted his head and removed the towel, glancing at her. She twisted her body in the water and floated up beside him, breathing in the sweet-scented steam of cactus flower and chicory. A few sticks of incense burned in the corners of the room, and decorative plants and flowers mixed their scents with the heavy air. "It's surprisingly spacious in here with just two people," Impa said.

"Yeah," Palo sighed. He took a moment to glance around the chamber, as if wondering why they were the only two smart enough to shirk their obligations in favor of bathing. "I know Talm likes to wander off and ignore her duties, but it seems unlike Link to miss out on the fun of a tactical gathering." He lifted his toes from the water and stared at them like he was waiting for them to wrinkle.

"He promised some Gerudo kids he'd help them find their cat."

Palo's laugh echoed across the empty marble. "They're going to lead him to some alley and rob him blind, poor kid."

"That's what I think. But he'll be better for it. He might develop some sort of wariness."

"Yes, well, he doesn't seem to possess much of that to begin with." Palo's eyes lowered and a concerned frown passed across his features for a moment. "Sometimes I wonder why a kid like that ended up in our company."

"You know how long of a story that is," Impa replied. "You were there for all of it."

"I know." He dipped his hair in the water and reemerged, slicking it back over his head and wiping his face. "Merel seems to think he's been chosen by some god or another."

"When did she tell you that?"

"I don't recall. Sometime during the winter festival, maybe. I had smoked a little too much firegrass so I don't remember the details."

"The gods, is it?" Impa felt some unnamable emotion stir in her chest—she could not tell if it was excitement, or agitation, or something else entirely. Perhaps it was the anticipation of a playful and aimless theological discussion she and Palo always found themselves falling into, ever since they had been teenagers. "I don't quite believe that."

"You don't? You're the one who went up Eldin with him. Hell, for all I know you could've _met_ the gods."

"Plenty of our people entreat the spirits of Eldin, and plenty get their pleas answered. It doesn't mean they were chosen by gods. Our patron spirits are small, Palo. They are close to the earth and do not control the lives of humankind."

"And, like any of us, they can die," he admitted.

"They can. And they do, often. More so now than they used to." Impa splashed some water on her face and rubbed it into her skin. "But I can believe in spirits. I have seen them. I have not seen the gods of the Hylians, or any of the thousand deities they worship here in the desert."

"Except Molgera."

Impa smiled. "Oh, yes. Molgera. I must admit she does seem quite godlike. But she is alive, like any of us. Whether or not she is actually a god is not our business—but she certainly seems worthy of worship."

Palo folded his hands behind his head. "I can believe Molgera is special, for a worm. I can believe in the little spirits that live in the shrines around Kakariko. I can even believe in the Hylian goddesses, if I smoke enough in one sitting. But I've met a lot of dead people in my time, and not one of them has claimed to meet their maker."

Impa stood, rubbing soap across her arms. "Did you ask?"

"Didn't need to."

She paused, thinking for a long moment. "I think it's irrelevant."

"What's irrelevant?" Palo's eyes snapped open. He seemed to have been lost in his own thoughts about the gods of the world.

"The question of whether or not anyone is chosen by a god is irrelevant. Take Link. _We_ chose him, Palo. I chose him when I decided to rescue him from the palace moat. You chose him when you agreed to help me remove his curse. We both chose to take him back to Kakariko with us, and he chose to obey the elder and ascend the mountain. No gods involved. Just us."

"That's not what Merel believes."

Impa sighed. "Merel is a woman worn by the burdens of caring for an entire village. She has to put her faith in something other than herself. It must help her bear the weight of responsibility. It would be almost narcissistic for her to admit that she is the only reason Kakariko is alive and thriving."

"Then would it not also be narcissistic to assume we're the only ones who get to choose the path Link takes?"

Impa splashed at him with a cupped palm, and he laughed, wiping the water from his face. "All right, I get your point." He lifted himself from the water with Impa, and she handed him a robe. He shrugged it over his shoulders and helped her with hers, tying a thick knot at its waist and patting it down. Outside the large, curved windows, the sun crept behind the intricate domes of the city.

"Should I scour the town for something to eat?" Palo asked.

"That sounds satisfactory." She slicked back her wet hair from her eyes and sighed. "I had better go find Link. Make sure he hasn't been stabbed and left to die by a gang of wayward children."

"Also satisfactory. I'll see you in a while, then." As Impa watched Palo disappear down the hall, she only hoped he would put on some clothes before wandering out into the streets for food. He had a habit, when too relaxed (or after too much firegrass), to emerge in public half-dressed. All his parts were the same to him, it seemed, and he was just as likely to forget to cover his bottom as his top. Impa figured the Gerudo girls who lounged on the streets would have no problem with it, and so long as he didn't care, she wouldn't either.

She crept to the generous changing room where her family had stored the extra clothes Ahnadib's servants had leant them, and pulled on the minimal amount. She wrapped a band around her chest as the Gerudo did, pulling on a pair of civilian trousers before quickly drying her hair and exiting the room.

She did not have to search far for Link. She found him in a salon nearby, sitting on a liberally cushioned window seat. Above him, an arch of open sunset glowed, past the intricate marble columns that framed the glassless portal. A small lizard scurried across the sill, next to his face, but he did not seem to notice it, nor did he seem to notice Impa's entrance. He was fully engrossed with the task at hand.

He bent over Impa's lyre, plucking carefully, soundlessly. His eyes followed the long vibrations of the strings, watching the white blur of each note resound in a sound-space he could not hear. He did not seem distressed to discover he could not play the instrument—he looked quite content to watch the strings rather than listen. His eyes glinted, his brow was smooth and relaxed, the corners of his mouth rose a little with each pluck.

Impa did not want to interrupt him, but when she moved silently across the room and sat opposite him on the window bench, his hand froze, his eyes widened, as if she had caught him doing something terribly wrong.

"Keep going, if it pleases you," Impa said.

Link shook his head. "It's just… I'm no good at this." He shoved the harp back to Impa with surprising haste.

She took it and looked it over. "Well… firstly, it seems I'm the only one who can coax a sound from the thing. I'm sure you could be a good musician if you practiced. You've just never tried. You were never taught."

"It's not like a deaf child could learn it," he answered.

"You'd be surprised what deaf children can do," Impa said. She lay the harp at her feet and scooted toward him. He averted his eyes, as if she were about to scold him. "Surely you've heard the name Errachella."

"Once or twice."

"She couldn't hear since childhood and became the greatest dancer in the country. So don't sell yourself short."

He stayed silent for a while, staring at something on the other side of the room. "I… was just thinking. I haven't heard you play harp."

"Of course you have," Impa said.

"I mean… music. I've never heard your music."

"Yes you—" She stopped herself when she realized he was right. She had recited Sheikah hymns to him, she hummed often; but she had never played a tune for him on her lyre—she had never played a tune for anyone since her climb up Mount Eldin. She hadn't been able to. Her strings spoke a different language now. "I suppose you haven't."

"Can you play something for me?" he asked.

His hopeful tone made her heart sink. "I don't think I can." It would be a lie to say she did not miss her music, but she had been loaned a talent much more useful, one that she had no choice but to value. She supposed she had not completely considered the pain of her lost songs; she had been distracted with so much else. But the disappointment in Link's face turned her heart a little. "I'll work on it. One day I'll play you a real song. Something that doesn't knock down walls or start fires."

He smiled and lowered his eyes. There was something about him, something about the way he avoided her gaze, hung his head, that was wrong. He seemed to shrink before her, like he was climbing back into the shell he had made for himself in the years of his silent servitude. She reached over and gripped his knee, sternly. "What's the matter?" she asked him. He lifted his eyes to hers, so full of contrition, shining almost green in the setting sun. "Out with it."

"I…" He bit his lip for a moment before continuing. "I don't know if what we're doing is right."

She released his knee. She raised an eyebrow and looked him over, at the bead of sweat on his forehead, at the remorse in his eyes. She almost laughed. Of course something like moral ambiguity would torture him to this degree. She sighed, scooting closer to him on the window seat, and touched the back of his hand, gently. "Tell me."

He seemed eager to release the admission. "The street kid who lost the cat… she was so worried. She wanted to know where it was at all times, so she could keep it safe when the fighting started. She said it was her only family left. She told me… she said her father was a Hylian soldier, her mother was a trader. When the war came, her mother sided with the man she loved. Ahnadib's fighters killed both of them." He paused for a moment. "That girl… she doesn't want revenge. She just wants the fighting to stop. She hopes the King will conquer the city, because she thinks the killing will only end when he wins. And I'm afraid… I'm afraid to believe she's right."

Filled with a sudden anger that surprised even her, Impa resisted the urge to shake him. His downcast eyes, his wringing hands, they were the inescapable signals of an incorrigible coward. But she didn't reach out and smack sense into him. She only took a deep breath and tried to hide the look that crossed her face.

He didn't appear to register her feelings—he seemed so caught up in his own. He raised his fist and held it to his forehead, speaking more into his wrist than to her. "I know, _I know_ the King is cruel. I know he hurts people. But I've hurt people, and so have you, and so has everyone. And he was kind to me. He didn't kill me when he should've. He should've killed me."

With a painful twist of her heart, Impa's anger vanished. Link raised his eyes to her, and she recognized the nature of the rage that swept through her from her own doubting heart. She had struggled with the same sort of thoughts in her worst moments. True, Ganond's family were pretenders to the throne, but the technological and economical advances their reign had brought were unprecedented. Garona's peacemaking, and Elgra's patronage of the Capital's most ambitious artists and engineers had built the Capital into the place it was now. To deny the good the Dragmire reign had done would be to erase an important chapter in the country's history. But it would not stop Impa from destroying their family.

She realized she was not angry with Link for discovering the confusing complexity of war and progress, she was angry with him for torturing himself over it.

Link continued. She let him—this was the longest she'd ever heard him speak. "I feel like I'm trying to hold water in my hands, but it leaks through the cracks between my fingers. I don't know if what we're doing will fix anything. How do we know if it's right, if it's worth it?"

Impa took a breath and squeezed his hand. "We don't. But here are the things I do know: Hyrule has always had its problems, but under the old family rule, there were no mass exterminations. The Gorons were still alive, and the Zora were still here. We Sheikah were not on the brink of extinction. The River Hylia wasn't clogged with factory waste. There were no slaves, and the spirits were still common."

"But the damage is done," he said, quietly. "Getting rid of the King won't bring back the Gorons, or the Zora. It won't bring back the spirits or dead Sheikah. It won't bring back the old family."

The sadness in his eyes told her he had not quite healed from his ordeal in the city; that he still held the face of the dead princess in his memory. Not that she expected him to recover fully, but the doubt and fear that colored his features was a clear symptom of that lingering injury.

Her father had never explicitly told her to keep silent about the news from the Capital. He had implied it, of course. But everyone, especially Impa, knew Link was not a talker. Her mind turned over itself a thousand times in a second, convincing her he did not need this distraction, then arguing that he did, then deciding it could wait, then deciding it couldn't. In the end, she gave in to the idea of lending him some hope.

"It might be back already."

His eyes widened. Of course, he did not know what she meant. But he could recognize the tone of optimism in her voice.

"This is just between you and me, Link." He nodded. "The royal family's bloodline may have reemerged somewhere in the Capital. When we drive out the King from this land, we will go see for ourselves. But if you ever want to find out if the princess' family is still alive, you will fight with us. You will fight, and you will survive, do you understand?" The sternness in her voice forced him to nod. "It is normal to have these doubts. There is no truly good side to be on in a war. We all fight for imperfect beliefs. You mustn't let that drain your hope. The only sure way to lose a fight is to throw down your sword before it starts."

He rested his hand over hers, and gave her a weak smile. She was sure he was about to respond when Palo burst in, a large platter of still-steaming food in hand. Talm tumbled in beside him, hair done up in Gerudo fashion, smelling overpoweringly of perfume. Link and Impa separated, the vein of their conversation lost in the sudden rush.

Talm seemed all too pleased to see Impa. "Well, well. Wait till I tell father I found his stringent little protégée slacking off."

Impa rolled her eyes. She slipped from the bench and helped Palo set down the gargantuan plate. "Where did you get this?" she asked.

"Galra gave it to me," he answered.

"It was _sad_ ," Talm put in. "She had this whole platter made for him and he just runs off with it without a second thought."

Palo frowned. "I thanked her. Profusely, if I remember."

"Palo, she clearly wanted you to invite her to share it with you."

"She didn't say anything," he replied. Impa shook her head as she helped him divide portions, breaking bread and scooping sweet-smelling pastes.

"She was afraid you'd say no if she asked. Gods above, it was so obvious." When Talm seated herself beside Impa, the scent radiating from her was so strong it was almost nauseating.

"What in hell's name have you done to yourself, Talm?" she gagged.

"Do you like it?" She shook out her hair, spreading her obnoxious new scent. "Galra took me to the city baths. They did my hair and gave me this perfume they said could entice any man I wanted it to."

"Entice? I think they meant repulse," Impa cringed.

"It doesn't smell bad," Link put in, kindly, as usual.

"It's all right, I suppose," Palo admitted.

Talm grinned smugly. "Clearly these gentlemen are far more refined than you."

"So, did you find your cat?" Palo asked Link.

"Yes," he answered. "And what a cat. It must've been some sort of wild desert cross-breed. It scratched us all up." His contrition, his confusion, seemed to have disappeared. Impa suddenly held no regrets about telling him of the news from the Capital. As he recounted his search, she saw life return to him, word by careful word. Propelled by the energy of his hope—or maybe a good meal—he once again let himself crack through the shell of his silent doubt. Impa wished he could be his full self more often. He was oddly beautiful in those moments, though he didn't know it, and she wasn't about to interrupt his story just to tell him.


	38. Beyond the Wall

"The same sun that rises on a battlefield sets on a graveyard."

Sir Olen of House Greenthorn

* * *

It was early morning when the warning bells of Obra Garud woke the city. From the gongs on the outer wall to the belfries of the council building at the heart of the fortified city, no inch was left untouched by the staggering peals. Cats flew from their naps with harrowing screeches, men and women dropped their mugs of spiced tea and coffee, lovers pulled away from one another in panic, dogs howled, children screamed, and Link nearly choked on his breakfast.

The bells reached him with a half a piece of flatbread stuffed into his mouth. He froze, his ears pricked at the repeating clangs, layered with every octave of every tocsin in the city. He coughed and struggled to swallow, noise pulsating through the room as alien as a dream. Still half-sleeping, he flew from the small table in his room, struggled to pull on his worn boots, and stumbled out into the hallway. He nearly choked all over again stuffing the remainder of his bread into his mouth, and he suddenly realized he needed to relieve himself. _No time,_ he thought, and swallowed the last of his breakfast in one painful gulp. Both hands free, he pulled his boots all the way up and broke into a run. The gongs and temple bells seemed to shake the entire residence, and he could almost feel the floor vibrate beneath him as he burst into the chaotic morning.

People poured into the streets in droves, half-dressed, clutching valuables, dragging crying children behind them. As they made their way to the council hall at the city's heart, stockpiled with food and bedding, secured by high walls and vigilant soldiers, the strong and able rushed in the opposite direction, toward the armory. Link followed them, knowing Talporom and the Gerudo officers would be there, giving out weapons and orders with equal generosity.

When he skidded to a halt by the open armory gates, he nearly bumped into Elpi. He stepped aside for her, and she didn't seem to even notice him; she flew by like the shadow of a bird, longbow slung across her back. A noisy crowd of Gerudo soldiers flowed in and out of the armory like debris on a fast river, turning and clumping in eddies of bodies, rushing and shouting to be the first to spill enemy blood. He was about to join them when a hand grasped his collar, and Impa's stern voice filled his ears.

"They're going to the outer wall. You're staying with us." She was woefully underdressed, hair disheveled, eyes ringed with residual sleep. Talm stood behind her in much the same state, but Palo and Talporom were nowhere to be seen.

"Where are the others?" Link asked.

"Our father is going to the outer wall with Elpi. Ahnadib has given him command of the archers north of the gate. Palo is… probably still asleep."

"He can sleep through this?" Link did not need to point out the resounding bells.

"Just wait till people start dying," Talm shook her head. "Then their ghosts'll wake him up."

The crowd of soldiers thinned. Newly armed and trembling with excitement, the steady flow of fighters eased into a slow trickle. As the last of the company dashed toward her post, armor of steel and leather glinting, Impa slipped inside the dusty armory.

Some officers lingered to convey orders to stragglers, a few more were donning their own gear for the impending fight, but Impa strode past them to a small room in the back of the stone building. She opened the heavy door and led the others inside, where their weapons and armor waited.

Impa pointed Link toward the corner, where his sword and hunting bow lay, and he found, among his effects, what appeared to be a full suit of Gerudo armor. "Gifts from Ahnadib," Impa said, half-buried in her own collection of martial artifacts. "She gave us all we would need for this event."

In silence, he slipped on the strong but breathable underclothes of a Gerudo warrior. They were oddly shaped—he guessed the tailors of the city mostly outfit these sorts of clothing to women, so it was a little tight in the waist and left too much room in the front of his chest. The padded leather trousers slid over his own nicely, and the greaves seemed a decent fit (he had to guess; he had no idea what he was doing). The cuirass, thin but strong and embossed with the symbol of the city—a sandworm winding around a vertical spear—seemed to sit over his chest pretty well, but he did not have extra hands to buckle it in back. He stood with the armor clasped to his chest, waiting for one of the others to finish her task so she could help him.

An unexpected pair of hands emerged from the darkness behind him. They jerked his cuirass tighter to his chest and fiddled with the buckles at the small of his back. He tried to turn, but the thick stiffness of his armor kept him facing forward as the hands finished their work. Only when one patted him on the head and he felt it was big enough to crush his skull did he realize they belonged to Nabru.

"First time?" she asked. He didn't know if she meant putting on a breastplate or going to war; he supposed they had the same answer anyway.

"Yes."

"Well, remember to take a good shit _before_ the fight starts. Too many rookies learn that lesson the hard way. Myself included." She laughed and reached for Link's pauldrons. As she fitted one to his shoulder, he saw she was already armored in thick plates of tempered steel and leather. The metal had a brassy hue, but whether that was the composition of her armor or a decorative decision, he couldn't guess. He thought about asking her, then decided it might sound like a stupid question, so he just stood in silence as she helped him cover his arms. Somewhere, in the distance, the bells sounded again. Nabru took in a deep breath as if smelling a waft of fresh air. "Music to my ears," she said. "I was getting fidgety. I can only let that vile spawn of Ganond linger outside my door for so long before I itch to kill him." She slapped Link's back, entirely too hard. "All done."

He felt restricted, too hot, and when he moved his arms something chafed painfully at the front of his shoulder. Impa and Talm, more lightly armored in plates of both Gerudo and Sheikah design, pulled their weapons to them—Impa with Bloodletter and her omnipresent harp, Talm with her twin swords about her waist.

Nabru gripped her spear and watched him gather his own weapons. "How do you feel?" she asked.

"Uncomfortable," he replied. "Like I'm suffocating."

The mischievous grin Nabru gave him was not without kindness. "Then you're ready."

* * *

At Talporom's command, another round of arrows screamed through the air, thudding into the raised shields of the King's footmen. With each wave of whistling shafts, a few of his men fell—Talporom had no doubt that those bolts that met their mark truest belonged to Elpi. He had never met a more skilled archer; he could only wish the Gerudo soldiers had the same coordination she did.

Plenty of arrows buried themselves in the sand by the feet of the oncoming soldiers, many more overshot, falling gracelessly into the wide empty space between the first battalion and the company of archers and engineers that followed with their ballistas and trebuchets. He knew the Gerudo fighters around him were better trained for melee combat. Their time would come when the King's soldiers tried to break through the walls of Obra Garud.

For now, he kept his eyes trained on the machines that followed the first wave, pulled on blades across the sand by roaring, indignant camels and dozens of footmen. He knew the King's torsion catapults and glinting ballistas would be well within their own firing ranges before his archers could take out the animals that pulled them, but the city had quite a few of its own such devices. The council and Ahnadib had given him command of the machines on the north side, and he planned to use them. He called an officer over and told her to turn the nearest ballista on its creaking tracks.

Elpi drew another arrow beside him, and he gave the order to fire. More soldiers fell, dropping their shields and collapsing to their knees. A company of archers approached behind, kicking sand in their wake, before stopping, drawing, and firing ineffectually into the wall. Occasionally an arrow thudded into a flagpole or a raised shield of a soldier around him, but he heard no cries of pain, no calls for a doctor. For that he could only be grateful.

 _Thank all the gods Ahnadib did not tell her company I'm a physician,_ Talporom thought. _Or I'd spend this battle half buried in groaning soldiers._ If there was one thing Talporom could say about Gerudo fighters, it was that they loved to get hurt. Scars and injuries were a mark of pride for them, and if they weren't rushing headlong into reckless battle, they were groaning in pain, making a show of their split helmets and broken limbs and lacerated skin. The men were just as bad as the women—perhaps worse, since they often had something to prove. They had to show that they were as strong and dedicated as the female soldiers, and a surefire way to do that was to get good and sliced up before carrying home the heads of their enemies. The more blood, the more pain, the more devoted the soldier.

A woman's voice, strong and clear, announced from a few feet behind him that the ballistas were within range. He relayed permission to fire down the line of machines on the wall. Masses hurdled through the air toward the King's army—stones, chunks of marble, scraps and debris from fortification. Clouds of sand burst from the impacts, and even perched on the top of the wall, Talporom could make out the cries of surprised and dying men. What looked to be the unused portion of the bust of a giant statue flew through the air toward the King's ballistas—Talporom could make out the shape of a woman's breast and shoulder as the stone twisted in the air, crashing into the King's machines with a burst of splinters and screams.

Hoots and hollers resounded from the responsible trebuchet operators. "What a way to go, eh? Crushed by a giant tit!"

The laughter of the soldiers intensified when the King's engineers attempted to retaliate. The stones and piles of dun bricks launched from the creaking machines fell far short of their target—at most they crumbled to nothing halfway up the impenetrable wall. Talporom watched the ammunition burst into dust below him, and wondered where the mess of rocks had come from—perhaps from the many outcroppings of cliffs that jutted out of the endless sands, perhaps from the collapsed ruins of conquered towns. Talporom did not have time to be curious. He readied his archers for another wave.

Farther than he could see, behind the infantrymen, the bowmen, the mages and each neatly partitioned phalanx of spearmen and knights, the King and his closest men-at-arms marched across the sand. He knew they would not show their ugly faces until the front lines were annihilated (from the way things were going so far, Talporom had little reason to think it could end any other way; the King's men fell like flies, even under the clumsy aim of half-trained Gerudo, and as far as he knew he had not lost a single soldier).

The projectile exchanges he shared with the opposing army were quick, predictable, and always in favor of the defenders of the wall. The archers on the southern side, led by one of Ahnadib's many, interchangeable sons, periodically spouted patriotic outcries of joy as they mowed down the front lines. They sobered themselves when a lucky shot from an enemy catapult took out a battlement near the gate, but in a fumbling mess of cursing soldiers and rock-dust, they pulled themselves together and regained formation, sending another wave of arrows floating like quick black mist over the oncoming army.

Talporom wondered if the King was using his expendable men to test the waters of the battlefield. Even with their hookshots and grappling hooks, their ladders and ropes, the soldiers that managed to reach the walls of the city did not make it far. They were close enough that even the worst of the archers could pick them off. Elpi had a clear enough view of the ropes they launched up the battlements that she could send an arrow through them when they pulled taut, launching the climbing soldiers by the dozen from the walls. The vats of boiling tar and heated sand stationed here and there on the battlements remained unused, much to Talporom's relief.

He lengthened his spyglass and held it to his eye. He ignored the arrows and debris flying past him—he only focused his attention on the far shadows of the battlefield, where the King no doubt loitered. He still could not make out his exact location, but he knew if the tides of battle continued to steadily rise in Obra Garud's favor, he'd make his appearance soon enough. He, and whatever new magic he had acquired in the far reaches of the desert.

Since Talporom's daughters had failed to bring back whatever object the King had sought in the wasteland, their foray over the edges of the map could not strictly count as a victory—though it was victory enough for him to see them return unharmed. What had concerned Talporom most was the item they _had_ brought back: a bluish piece of scrap metal that seemed nothing more than junk. When Link had shown him the item shortly after his return, an unexplainable shiver ran through him. The young man hadn't been able to say much about it, but he did say Elder Merel had a piece just like it (Talporom had interpreted the confused sighs and failed attempts at an explanation as an ill effect of the ascent of Eldin—he was all too familiar with the consequences of that ritual). If the elder was interested in keeping something so seemingly harmless among those piles of ancient artifacts in her cave, it must have some sort of value.

His daughters had told him the King had only shown interest in a goddess statue and a pool of water—they had much more to say about the stone woman and the room beyond it than they had about the sliver of metal. But if by some chance that _was_ what the monarch had sought in the desert, it was possible he had settled for second-best discovery in its place. Talporom would've too, considering the length and perilousness of the trek to the Colossus. But since Impa and Talm had failed to discover exactly what the second-best was (though they had more than a few theories), Talporom was stuck here, on the battlements of Obra Garud, trying his best to postulate what his royal opponent would do next.

An arrow whizzed by his ear, and he blinked. He did not flinch, he didn't retreat from the sound, but in the split second his eye closed to the scene behind his spyglass, something had changed. When he opened it again, he had to turn the corners of the brass rim of the eyepiece to focus. It was an ingenious little device, manufactured by the cleverest inventors in the Capital, but it could not give Talporom a clear enough image for him to understand what was happening in the far ranks of the royal army. So he lowered the spyglass and stared, waiting for his own eyes to clear up his confusion.

A growl of consternation rose from the ranks of archers as they turned their eyes to the anomaly on the battlefield. Elpi was suddenly beside him, muttering to him between distracted—but still startlingly accurate—bowshots.

"Is that a sandstorm or something?" she asked. The worry in her voice was apparent; her greatest skill was rendered useless when she could not see her target.

Talporom, in vain, raised the spyglass to his eye again, adjusting its rim with well-bitten fingernails. "It's possible. But storms in this region do not usually begin that violently." He stared at the puffs and shudders of sandy wind as Elpi took down a few more of the King's trebuchet operators, snapped a few more grappling ropes that had miraculously slinked up the side of the walls.

Talporom suddenly clicked his spyglass shut and replaced it at his waist. He turned from the battlefield, trotting across the wall, motioning for a captain to take command temporarily. "Elpi, come with me," he said. She followed, lowering her longbow, occasionally glancing back toward the east, to the oncoming cloud. Talporom danced down a short flight of stairs to a platform on the inner wall, where messengers and a few reserve medics waited. He grabbed the nearest girl and spun her around on her golden khussas. "Parchment," he told her.

"S-sir," she stuttered, big yellow eyes widening. "I can carry a message to the inner wall verbally. Just tell me what to say."

"No time—parchment. Surely you have some. If you don't, go find some."

She turned red. "Just… just this." She pulled something from her breast pocket, nearest her heart, and he snatched it hurriedly. _Gods,_ Talporom thought. _I've probably stolen a poor little girl's love letter._ He did not read its contents, which were carefully drawn in perfect Gerudo calligraphy, deformed only by the wrinkles where the girl had folded and unfolded it many times over. He simply turned it to its blank side, and after wrestling an inky tincture from the nearest medic, traced his finger along it, scrawling desperately in his hasty, nearly illegible Hylian.

* * *

On the inner wall, stationed far above the quickly emptying outer districts of Obra Garud, Link learned the true panicked boredom of warfare. He fidgeted, baking in his armor, wishing desperately he had taken Nabru's advice and relieved himself before he'd crawled into his heavy getup.

Impa, Talm and Nabru stood beside him, staring at the action on the outer wall, as they had been doing for what he assumed must've been at least an hour. Palo had appeared, fully armored, a few minutes ago, asking what he missed.

"Nothing," Link told him.

"It's always like that. Take my advice, kid. Always show up late to a battle. You'll miss the boring stuff, and it might mean you arrive at the right moment to act like a hero."

Impa ignored Palo's entrance. She stared ahead, a thin frown on her face. He could tell something was troubling her, but whether it was the same anticipation of combat that sent his own heart struggling in his chest, or a result of her peculiar intuition, he could not guess. She concentrated on the dust and noise that rose from the outer wall, and when a portion of the southern battlements exploded in a burst of debris, she sighed. Bodies fell from the wall, tumbling into the city, some still as death, some flailing, screaming, struggling to grip outcroppings of stone and metal on the wall before they disappeared into the city streets. Link's gut turned when their hollers suddenly stopped.

No one around him seemed to share his reaction. He did not know if they were used to this sort of sight, or they were better at hiding their aversion to it. Nabru did nothing but scratch the back of her bare head when she saw the soldiers fall. The Gerudo woman behind Link, a standard-bearer holding the sigil of Obra Garud, shook her head in disappointment but stayed silent.

Nothing happened for a long time (or at least, it _seemed_ a long time). Link swayed on his numb feet, resting his elbow on the hilt of the sword at his waist, and blinked against the sandy wind. When a thin _thunk_ and a surprised cry met his ears, he turned to the standard-bearer. His eyes followed hers up the wooden pole to find an arrow buried at the base of the banner, where the tail of the worm curled. The woman backed up, lowering the ensign, and pulled the arrow from it.

Attached to the shaft, rolled and yellowed, was a piece of parchment. By this time, the others had gathered around the standard-bearer in curiosity. Impa glanced up to the outer wall, squinting, and must've recognized one of the thin shapes against the grey sky. "Elpi sent it," she said.

Link did not have time to wonder how the woman managed to plant an arrow in a standard shaft from the opposite wall. He only watched as the soldier removed it and unfolded it to find lines of Gerudo text.

"Well, read it," Talm said.

"Um… 'You are the light that breaks through the palm leaves at night, the water that shines—'"

"Other side," Impa told her.

The woman flipped the paper and squinted at the hastily scrawled Hylian. "I can't make it out."

"Definitely from Talporom, then," Palo said.

Impa took the paper from the woman, staring at its short message. Her eyes darted across the letters, closed for a few seconds, then darted again. She crumpled the note in her palm.

"They've got a worm," she said.

"They've got a _what_?" Talm nearly screamed.

"How?" Palo asked.

"I don't know."

Nabru said nothing. She merely started to turn a hideous shade of angry red.

Link could not help but think about the odd quietness of Wormhaven on the way back from the Colossus. He did not know if the creatures had fled because of the threat of capture, or if that woman who had risen from the water had summoned them from their habitat into her control. Either way, Nabru had been insistent that the witch had been the one to empty the sacred land of its occupants. And as the panic spread from his heart to every limb, he knew she had been right.

The cries of the soldiers on the outer wall drew him from his thoughts. A haze of sand and dust seemed to overtake the gates, and panic spread. Figures scurried from one place to another, drawing bows, shouting, climbing onto ballistas and firing desperately. The way they all leaned, the way the silhouettes of the machines pointed their noses nearly straight downward told him they shot at something unsettlingly near the gate.

A deafening boom shook the city. The stone under Link's feet trembled, and he threw out his arms to keep himself from tumbling into the streets below. He lifted his head toward the city gate, fortified with steel and stone and wood. Another impact tore across Obra Garud, shaking its very foundations, threatening to throw soldiers from their perches on the inner wall. The gates creaked and bent, steel screamed, wood splintered, resisting the onslaught of pressure from the creature on the other side.

"Take this to Ahnadib," Impa said, nearly throwing the note at the bewildered standard-bearer. "See that she knows what's happening."

Another boom, another screech of tortured metal from the front gate. The soldier flinched. "I think she can hazard a guess," she said, but did as Impa commanded. She took the standard with her when she flew across the wall, toward where Ahnadib stood with the other council members, relaying orders.

Link turned back to the gate, watching the wood and metal bend under the weight of the worm on the other side. The soldiers on the outer wall scurried about, pooling like water on the two barbicans nearest the city entrance, drawing and releasing their arrows in a flurry of panic. Link could see a few messenger girls run along the wall, crying out to any soldier they could. Some of them made their way down ladders to the streets below, filled with news of what the archers had seen, making their way toward the inner wall.

One of these messengers fell under the shower of debris when the gates finally gave way. Link could see her cover her head at the noise, fending off splinters of wood as she stumbled away from the chaos, away from the screeching of bending metal and the earth-shattering booms of collapsing rock. She disappeared back into the shadows of buildings when a worm, sharp-toothed and nearly as big as Molgera herself, flailed through the broken gate.


	39. The Siege of Obra Garud

Hey everyone! Thanks for reading! Just wanted to let you know we're neck-deep in war now, so there will be violence. Not that there wasn't before, but it might be more intense than it has been for the majority of the story. I figured maybe a few readers might appreciate a warning. Thanks again!

* * *

"There are many things soldiers will say about war. Some say war is hell, others say war is glorious. Some say it steals men's souls, and others say it grants their manhood. Some say it is inevitable, others say it can be eliminated with diplomacy. The only underlying truth to gain from these interpretations seems to be that war is, first and foremost, confusing."

Samuel Red, _Recollections of Soldiers: An Examination of the Eldin War_

* * *

"Well, this is disturbing in all sorts of ways."

Palo's voice betrayed no hint of fear. Only the bemused but somewhat unconcerned tone he adopted when something surprised him. Or horrified him. Link could never tell.

A gargantuan black worm's head wriggled through the front gate, ovoid mouth opening and closing, blue tongue probing the buildings around it. It periodically let out screeches of what may have been pain as it pushed inch by furious inch through the gate, head flinging, teeth glinting. Stone crumbled where its length met the wall, and hundreds of arrows, fired from the reluctant bows of Gerudo soldiers, bounced off its armored plates or buried themselves in the soft flesh between them. The worm screamed and writhed, barely hindered by the walls around it, and pulled itself farther through the gate, smashing a market street with the length of its uncanny body.

"They… _can't_." It was the first time Link had heard Nabru speak since they had learned of the worm. Her face was red with fury, her armored hand clutched her spear, shaking. She bore her teeth like an infuriated animal, and put a foot on the edge of the battlement, watching her own comrades riddle the symbol of her faith with arrows. As the worm squirmed and writhed through the gate, pulling the entirety of its enormous body into the city, she cursed long and loudly, sprinkling her Gerudo monologue with a few phrases of Hylian: "That evil, snake-hearted, cowardly spawn of Ganond's poison seed!" The worm thrashed about the outer districts, crumbling buildings to dust, and the King's soldiers poured through the broken gate, following its mad trajectory. Nabru tossed back her braid and called to the direction of the oncoming army. "Ganondorf! I will slice off your shriveled little prick and serve it to you! I will grind you to paste and spread you over the walls for the vultures!"

With that oath, she nearly threw herself from the inner wall. She launched toward the nearest watchtower, running along the parapets, moving her giant body with surprising speed. She disappeared into the shadows of the brick, no doubt aiming for a window through which she could jump to the nearest rooftop.

None of the other soldiers appeared surprised to see their commander rush headlong into the destruction. They just readied their arrows, waiting to pick off the men pouring in from the front gates. They were used to this; no doubt they knew Nabru and knew what she expected of them.

The worm, having finished its task of breaking through the gate, now concerned itself with destroying everything around it. It rolled its body across buildings, mindlessly crushing any unlucky soldier, friend or foe, who happened to be in its way. It seemed lost, caged within the walls of Obra Garud, like an animal that knew it'd been tricked into a trap.

A few hundred shafts stuck from the worm's enormous body, but most of the bolts fired in its direction ricocheted off its dark segments harmlessly. "The arrows are just itching it," Talm said, as it writhed its way through the abandoned bazaars, leaving nothing but dust in its wake.

"Come with me, then," Palo said, gripping her wrist. He started to run, taking the same path as the messenger they had sent only minutes before, turning only to shout back at Impa: "Make sure Nabru doesn't get swallowed!" He disappeared into the billowing dust rising from the city.

Impa motioned to Link before sweeping in the direction of Nabru's trail. He followed her, tearing past the stoic archers to the watchtower that would guide them to the city below, silently entreating all the gods he could think of to protect them both.

* * *

"If you're going to report to me there's a giant sandworm destroying my city, you're a little late." Ahnadib, looking ridiculous in her decorative cuirass, wore a scowl that seemed to encompass her entire face. Her large arms crossed uncomfortably across her pointed metal breasts; she and the other council members, equally as uselessly armored, watched the creature tear through the outskirts of Obra Garud.

"We figured you already knew," Palo said. "What we're here about is how to kill the thing."

The worm wrapped itself around a temple belfry, apparently for no other reason than it found it displeasing. It squeezed its entire body, segmented plates shifting and glinting in the dusty light. The tower crumbled in with a languid creak of deforming bells, and it haughtily flung the debris, crushing the rest of the neighborhood.

"How does one go about killing a sandworm?" a councilman asked. He was the only male of the bunch, one of those half-Gerudo merchant types. An ambassador between races and genders, or so he probably told himself.

"We _don't,_ " said another, an elderly woman with a hooked nose that could rival a hawk's. "If we destroy it, the cult of Molgera will revolt. And they aren't known for holding their beliefs gently."

Ahnadib's yellow eyes darted to Palo. "Tell me the state of Nabru and her soldiers."

"She went apeshit," he replied. "Nearly jumped off the battlements. Shouted to the world that she'd cut off Ganondorf's dick and feed it to him."

"A reaction anyone with half a brain in her skull could anticipate," Ahnadib sighed, wrinkled eyes narrowing. "She will not be pleased with us. But for the sake of this city, even for the sake of her mad cult, we must stop this thing."

"That's what I'm here about—" Palo started, before another council member broke in.

"What about its eyes? Everyone knows to go for a beast's eyes."

"It _has_ none, you idiot," Ahnadib replied.

"But it has a mouth," said Palo. "A great big one."

"So? Short of sending a sacrificial battalion down into its stomach to cut it from the inside, I don't see how—" Ahnadib fell silent at Palo's look. "What is your suggestion, then?"

Palo almost smiled. "Are you familiar with Sheikah bombcraft?" Ahnadib raised an eyebrow, and he smiled knowingly (in truth, he was an amateur in the subject himself, but just from what Sheim and Elpi had taught him over the years, he could _sound_ like he knew what he was doing, which was twice as important as knowing in the first place)."You have pitch, yes?" She nodded. "Resin, saltpeter, charcoal, oil—you have all manner of combustibles and explosives ready to pour down on the King's men if it comes to it."

"You're not suggesting—"

"Of course, flinging fire at its carapace won't work. But it's soft on the inside, isn't it? Like everything."

He heard Talm gulp. He had to say he was rather pleased with the looks the council members gave him. Doubt and faith flickered across their features simultaneously—he could almost see the rusty old gears in their heads creaking and whirring.

"We need to consolidate materials," he said. "If we wheel 'em across the wall, it'll only take Talm and me a few minutes to show your soldiers how to cook a spicy enough potion. We'll need plenty of it, though—and flint, and one bowman. Mediocre to expert preferred."

"I can do it." Talm had been silent the entire conversation, perhaps simply willing to follow Palo's absurd train of thought to its conclusion before throwing in her weight behind the idea. She could be quite logical sometimes, or quite afraid of disapproval; Palo had not decided which applied in this case. Either way, the council members seemed to warm up to the idea.

"All we need to worry about is luring it to the right spot," Palo said. He cupped his chin. "What attracts worms? Loud noises? The smell of their own kind?" The council members glanced at one another. "Fresh meat?"

The look on Ahnadib's face told him he'd guessed correctly. Worms, like most creatures of the barren desert, were carnivorous. "Sometimes a few drops of camel's blood is enough to lure one," she said. Her eyes wandered to the gate, where no doubt volumes of the stuff had already been spilled—but of the less tasty human variety. The worm itself did not seem interested in eating the soldiers at its tail, only with flattening a market street with the length of its body. "But we will have to bring it something sweet-smelling enough to catch its attention."

"Just lower Talm down the wall," Palo suggested. She still exuded the scent of the floral perfume Galra had gifted her—and probably would for several days despite regular bathing.

"Palo, now is not the time," she said.

Ahnadib, unamused, turned to her women. "You, relay the order to wheel the incendiary material here. All of it. And you, bring me one of the _gharanad_. The fattest one we have." The soldier nodded and disappeared down the stairs to the inner districts.

"It that like a criminal or something?" Palo asked.

"I do not know how it works in your savage mountain province," she answered. "But Obra Garud's leaders do not feed their own people to wild beasts. Human sacrifice does not look good when we run for reelection."

"Ah, so that's the only reason, is it?"

"Sheikah, you are tempting me to offer you to the worm instead."

Palo shrugged as he looked out over the destruction, over the pungent mist of death he was sure only he could see and smell. "I was counting on this being an exciting day, anyway."

* * *

Link could barely see through the dust and chaos of the city streets. Gerudo footwomen had poured out the tower behind him, spears ready, armor clinking. Far across a boulevard once abundant in grocers and street drummers, he made out the dark shadow of the oncoming army. Their shouting echoed down the thoroughfare, and a few enemy soldiers came into view, raising spears and shields and swords, ready for the Gerudo fighters that jockeyed for the pleasure of being the first to engage them. Neither Nabru nor the worm were anywhere in sight.

Impa followed the soldiers, falling behind so Link could catch up. The first clang of metal on metal rang out through the district ahead of them, and the two regiments commingled, a flurry of red silk, leather plates and silver armor. A dark, heavy feeling possessed him, and he drew his sword.

"Where did Nabru go?" he asked. "Toward the worm?"

"No," Impa answered. "Toward Ganondorf."

She would've headed for the gates, then. They'd have to fight their way through the cluster of men and women slashing and clanging and screaming all across the boulevard. Or they could do the Sheikah thing and—

Impa was already making her way toward the shadow of a dark alleyway. She disappeared between two buildings, away from the fighting, and Link ran after her, not quite willing to sheathe his sword. He flew through the smoke, and the sound of combat deteriorated behind him. Somewhere, off to his right, he could hear the crumbling of buildings as the worm writhed its way through the city. His heart beat in his throat, and he prayed to whatever god would listen that he would not encounter the thing.

They weren't a quarter of the way to the front gates before a noise, distinct from the clashes and crumblings, stopped Link in his tracks. He skidded to a halt beside a half-collapsed building, searching for the source of the sound. It was high-pitched and desperate—not quite the cry of a death, but close. Link called to Impa, and she turned, hand on Bloodletter's hilt. When she saw he was in no danger, merely kneeling at the splintered entrance to a crushed building, she trotted next to him and knelt.

The sound of a crying child was easily recognizable now that they were close. A look of pity crossed Impa's face, replaced with resolution when he waved her away.

"Go find Nabru," he said. "I'll catch up."

Impa's eyes darted from him to the crumbling building, then back to him. He knew she was weighing her duties, sorting through what she could and should do, holding her contradictory wants and obligations up to the light to examine. She always wore a complex frown when making a difficult decision, but after half a second she nodded, gave him a Sheikah salute and wordlessly disappeared down the other end of the road, turning a corner and vanishing into the dust.

Link leaned down into the collapsed doorway of what must've once been quite a decent house, and called out. A cry answered him, and he managed to squeeze himself through what remained of the entrance, crouching in a narrow space held up only by a few particularly stubborn stumps of columns. Before him squatted a boy, covered in dust, leg pinned under a fallen beam. He screamed when he saw his rescuer was a Hylian man, blade still bare, eyes hidden under a shadowy helmet.

Link quickly sheathed his sword as the boy tried to struggle out from under the splintered wood. His yellowish eyes widened when Link knelt to him, offering a hand. The boy's light red hair was caked in blood, and Link could see scrapes and splinters in his hands where he tried to lift the wood from his leg.

"I know you," Link said.

The kid squinted, and after a long moment, recognized the face under the helmet. "You found Aberu's cat."

"I'm going to help you." Link gripped the wood and pulled with all his strength, allowing the boy to drag himself from under the beam, wailing and leaving spots of blood. Link dropped the beam again and looked the kid over; he was trying to stand, teetering, but one of the bones in his lower leg had snapped. Part of it jutted through bleeding skin, and Link's heart rose to his throat.

"Get on my back," he said, and knelt. Considering their reputation, turning one's back on Gerudo children—even the boys—was ill-advised, but Link was not worried. This kid had followed him around while he searched the streets for the missing cat, spouting a rude remark here and there, but he was harmless. In the end, he had even helped corner the animal (he and about a dozen other urchins who never missed an opportunity for adventure).

A pair of thin brown arms wrapped around his shoulders and he hauled the kid to the dusty entrance. "Are you all right?" Link asked as he crouched and started to crawl through the opening. "Where are your friends? Are you the only one here?"

"She left me…" the boy muttered, and cried out as Link bumped his broken leg against the side of the collapsed doorway. He apologized and glanced over his shoulder to see part of a sweaty brown face, eyes dulled with pain and shock. He worried the kid would pass out and let go of his shoulders, so he tried to lure him into a conversation that might keep him awake.

"Who left you?" he asked, as he started up the street.

"My sister."

"I'm sure she didn't mean to."

"She did," the kid wheezed. Link rounded the corner of the street, back into the alley he and Impa had recently run through. It was empty, but he could see the flash of blades on the far end, so he took another route. "But it's not her fault," the boy continued. Even his voice seemed to ache, his tone was dreamy, but Link could not tell if it was fatigue or pain. "I told her to. We were going to… when the bells rang and everyone ran away, take what they left behind. She said this was our chance to get rich. But when the worm…" the boy paused to sob into the back of Link's neck for a moment. "I told her to leave without me. I thought I was being brave."

"You _were_ ," Link replied, but he didn't have time to elaborate further. The kid cried out when Link dropped to the ground and shoved him off, promptly ending the conversation. When he stood again, he lifted his shield to block the incoming swipe of a short sword. He drew his own, still crouching, as the Hylian soldier struck down again, blade clanging on his shield's metal rim. Link struck upward, under the swordsman's black gambeson, to the tender, unprotected spot on his inner thigh.

Link had tended to soldiers' armor sometimes in the King's camp, when it was needed. He had listened to them complain about the weak spots, the uncomfortable chafing, the ill-fitting parts. He thanked his own meticulous eavesdropping when he slid the length of his blade across the soldier's thigh, unimpeded by metal plates. The feeling of a sword slicing through flesh was new to him. It almost terrified him how easily the edge slid through the man's muscle, like Irma's best cutting knife through venison.

The man looked down at Link and struck again, ineffectually, before falling to the ground, unable to support himself on his damaged leg. He let go of his sword the next time it bounced off Link's shield, and he writhed on the ground, holding his leg as a torrent of dark blood spilled from it. Link stared for a minute in horror, knowing he couldn't possibly help the man he'd just struck, and realized with a turn of his stomach that if he lingered any longer he might have to watch him die. So he flicked his sword, wordlessly replaced it in his sheath, picked the boy up and kept moving. The soldier shouted accusations and challenges at him as he rounded the far corner, assuring Link that he would live, and exact revenge. It was almost a relief to hear the gruff insults fly after him as he retreated.

He hoisted the boy higher on his back, and the kid squirmed in pain. Link struggled for breath, keeping his eyes on the far watchtower where the Gerudo reserves poured into the streets to join their comrades. Beyond it, there was safety and medicine, and if the little boy was lucky, his sister.

"Tell me about your sister," Link wheezed. "Everything good about her."

* * *

Impa found Nabru by following nothing but her aura of violence. The woman moved across the battlefield with a tornado of dust and shouts, leaving a trail of dead in her wake. She was easy to spot by the definitive glint of her spearhead—it danced like a comet, swinging around with such power it practically piled up men on it before launching them back into the dust. When one brave soldier came close enough to even think about landing a hit, she swiped his sword aside and cut off his arm before kicking him back into his compatriots. He writhed, spraying blood into the horrified faces of the other soldiers as Nabru, in perfect Hylian, insulted their manhood.

Impa had to stop and admire the ludicrous tally of bodies she racked up. They fell around her in a circle, with the radius of the exact length of her spear—even other Gerudo soldiers weren't interested in wandering too near that blade. It seemed Nabru was used to fighting alone.

But numbers were numbers, and numbers could win battles. So when Impa spied a soldier drop his sword and aim a crossbow in Nabru's direction, no doubt thinking himself clever, she relieved him of his device. His hands flew off with it, still clutching the loading spring, and she cut him down quickly before turning to see Nabru staring at her, bitter smile on her face. Almost absentmindedly, she finished the last two soldiers around her with one mighty swipe of her spear.

"So the Sheikah joins me," she said. Impa slung Bloodletter over her back and approached the Gerudo. A thin spatter of blood colored her dark, bare face, and a few hairs of her tight braid had come loose. "Your father says you have the tattoos of a warrior. Why don't you show me why?"

Impa stood beside Nabru on her pile of victims and looked out toward the gate, where the next wave of men poured in. When the soldiers caught sight of the two of them loitering, with no one left to fight, they were eager enough to oblige. Impa figured she might as well please Nabru with a demonstration. She stepped forward, letting the blade fall from her back, and swung it wide, toward the three closest approaching soldiers. The first she sliced under the armpit, in the soft place revealed when one lifted one's sword too high. The next caught the blade in the helmet, and the third was knocked to the ground with the squirming body of the second. As he tried to wriggle away, Nabru stepped up and finished him off with the tip of her spear. She lifted the weapon above her head, beckoning for more.

The soldiers indulged her. Wave after wave they came—most directed themselves at the bulk of the Gerudo army, but a few brave souls took the side route, charging the pair of women standing on the rubble, bodies piled around them.

Nabru was an endless bounty of carnage—almost comically so. When Impa's arms ached and she had to lean on Bloodletter's hilt, Nabru was charging once more into the fray, spear glinting, long braid whipping like fire. When Impa's lungs burned with fatigue, Nabru seemed more energetic than ever. She fought like Galra danced—with each movement, she released and displayed a bit of her own soul.

Impa was no stranger to battle, but she had to admit she had encountered nothing on this scale. She faced each fight with a grim determination to survive, unafraid but cautious, while Nabru seemed almost bored with the onslaught—the strongest axemen and quickest fighters were not enough for her. She seemed to seek out the most dangerous-looking of each wave, and was inevitably disappointed in the fight.

So it was no surprise that when Haema's elite appeared on the scene, she leapt at the opportunity. Ululating, she swung her spear around and went for the first man she saw—some haughty young knight on horseback. Impa buried the tip of Bloodletter in the dust and panted, watching the Gerudo warrior stab the horse through its exposed throat before knocking the young man from his mount. She even let him scramble for his weapons and put up a good fight before she inevitably left him bleeding in the dirt.

Impa shook her head. No wonder this woman had a reputation. She pulled Bloodletter from the ground, stepping toward the fray to rejoin her, but stopped in her tracks. Too late, she heard shuffling at her back, and turned just as a young soldier brought his sword down on her. She stumbled back, steadying herself with the mass of her own blade, as his sword glanced off her thin breastplate. She knew her skin remained unbroken, but that did not stop the impact from sending a shock of pain through her torso. She stepped up toward the soldier, indignation rising in her. If this idiot thought he could manage to outmaneuver a Sheikah, she would have to teach him otherwise. Just as she raised her sword, eager to show him the same arts that had felled so many of his compatriots, he did something that both surprised and infuriated her—he ran.

Bewildered, she stared after him for a few seconds before giving chase. Impa slung Bloodletter over her back and ran after him through the dusty streets of the city. She hurdled debris, dodged fallen pillars, slid unnoticed past straggling fighters, and grew angrier with each passing second. The coward still clutched his sword as he stumbled away from her, armor bouncing noisily, but he proved something of a sprinter. Every step she took only brought more distance between them.

She realized he was running southward, to the districts where the worm still wreaked havoc. Part of her wanted to turn around, to leave him to the mercy of the incensed creature, but she couldn't bring herself to give up the chase. She also knew she couldn't catch him weighed down with Bloodletter, so as she watched him sprint across an empty, half-destroyed street, she reached behind her and pulled her lyre from its leather straps. Still running, she plucked a familiar chord.

A sharp burst of air flew from her instrument, twisting up the street, throwing debris and dust, until it caught up with the man's flailing feet. The wind swept him forward, and with a cry of surprise, he tumbled to a halt at the end of the alley. By the time he managed to roll to his knees, Impa was leaning over him, her lyre's resounding echo stirring an angry whirlwind of dust around her.

The man quickly threw down his weapon and bowed. He placed his empty hands before him and pushed his head into the dirt in a gesture all too familiar to Impa. "Please, I'm just a cook by trade—" he started. "I—I got children—"

She narrowed her eyes at him. He tugged off his helmet and threw it at her feet, raising his eyes to hers. The fear contorted his face to something ugly, something detestable, but the way his messy blond hair fell across his blue eyes, the guilty way his brows knit together over a straight nose reminded her irrevocably of Link. She relaxed, just a little, and the man blathered on, begging, pleading. She lowered her harp and the wind died, dust settling on the rubble around them. She stared at him intensely until he shut his running mouth. As soon as he fell silent, she spoke. "Your officers will kill you for running."

He paled. "I know. I just—"

"And the Gerudo don't take prisoners. Especially deserters."

The man's incoherent stammering degenerated into sobs and he raised his hands to his face.

"So I suggest you hurt yourself. Badly. And make it look like someone else did it. Maybe some fool will take pity on you." She replaced her harp and turned her back on him. She knew she had nothing to fear from this coward, who knelt, shaking, at the end of the street. She did not look back as she walked from the alley, allowing no discomfort to show on her face.

* * *

Palo had been fully prepared to lower himself off the side of the battlement for the worm. It wasn't the most dangerous thing he'd lived through, and even if he died, hardly anything would change. He knew all the rivers of spirit, all the pathways in the distant darkness the dead took to the next world over, and he knew how to wait around, like the other restless ghosts. He would be there to watch his closest companions grow old, and when their time came, he'd be there to help them onto wherever it was they were going next. He figured it would be just like living, perhaps a little quieter.

But the air was already saturated with the smell of human blood, and a few more drops would not likely catch the worm's interest. People were bony and gristly, and sandworms much preferred meatier snacks—their favorite of which, apparently, was the noble _gharanad_. That flavor of dromedary, Ahnadib told him as her women struggled to drag and coax it up the steps to the wall, was specifically bred to attract worms. Sure, they were rideable—if you liked stubbornness and pugnacity in a mount—but those in the wormsilk trade only used them as a lure. They would bring several out in their caravans, and once they had a site in mind, they would kill the _gharanad_ to keep the nearby worms distracted while they harvested the silk.

The animal seemed to know its fate, as most animals did. It resisted its handlers, but the soldiers' desperation outweighed its own, and they finally pulled it to the top of the wall. It struggled and spat as two soldiers cut its throat, and Palo sensed its soul pass quickly from its body, without remorse, without prolonged suffering.

Still, there was that taste in his mouth that always lingered after a nearby death. That was one of the first side effects of his particular spiritual condition he'd noticed as a child—the first time he'd seen Irma kill a chicken for supper, he could taste the blood before it hit the ground. He'd gotten used to the sensation, of course, and stopped complaining when he learned there was nothing to be done about it, but he couldn't help but lick his lips a little when the animal was lowered over the side of the wall. He tried to taste the sweat of his upper lip, the dust in the air, anything but what tingled on his tongue the moment the dromedary's life ended.

A couple women wound a rope around its feet and rigged it to the end of a repurposed catapult as their comrades mixed the last flammable ingredients into Palo's (admittedly slapdash) recipe. A streak of blood followed the animal down the wall, and its feet twitched as the ropes tightened around its tendons. The pulleys of the machine creaked in protest, and the dromedary stopped its descent, neck limp, tongue drooping from its open mouth. The other soldiers, readying the cauldrons of pitch and tar, fidgeted nervously as the gears creaked to a halt. Even Talm's hands trembled a little while she waited, clutching her short bow, pitch-stained arrow nocked.

It worked better than Palo had anticipated. The worm's probing tongue, glowing an uncanny blue in the dusty sunlight, twisted in the air, picking up the sweet scent in the high winds. It turned over, whipping its tail against the nearest building, sending a spray of dust and debris into the air, as it slithered toward them.

Palo knew worms were not too fast when they were not submerged in the sand. Out of its element, it threw itself wildly toward the inner wall, destroying entire neighborhoods with the undulations of its armored body. It screeched, long tongue lolling, smelling. As it approached, Palo could feel Talm tense beside him. She raised the bow, breathing softly, eyes locked on the mouth of the giant beast.

Palo had to admit he hadn't given the creature's magnitude enough credit. He knew the inhabitants of Wormhaven were big, but up against a backdrop of human-sized buildings, with human-sized weapons poking from its back, its immensity was nothing short of ridiculous. Palo forced himself to gulp down his doubt; with each squirm the creature came closer, grew bigger, its dark mouth opening wider than the city gates. Teeth the size of Palo himself dotted the round, dark gums, and the black tunnel of its throat seemed to stretch without end. He no longer wondered why the worm was considered a symbol of infinity.

The creature reached the wall, thorny tongue flicking up toward the dangling dromedary, and it pressed the length of its front against the slabs of stone, trying to raise itself toward its prey. Palo shouted for the pulley operators to pull the dead animal upward with all their might. The worm's tongue whipped angrily as the food flew just out of its reach, and it let out a frustrated squeal. But it stretched, pressing itself farther up the wall. A putrid stink spread from its ugly maw, though Palo could not identify it—it wasn't quite deathly, but it certainly wasn't pleasant, either. He resisted the urge to cover his nose and instead signaled with both hands when its mouth was within range. The soldiers beside him pushed the cauldrons forward, tipping them on their pivots, and the flammable mess tumbled viscously through the air. Some of it splattered on the wall, some on the dromedary, but most fell down the worm's gaping throat, staining its teeth and splattering the inside of its dark mouth.

At the taste of sulphur and pitch, the worm retracted, throwing its head back. It was a delayed movement of a surprised creature, but Palo could tell there wasn't enough time to pour all the concoction into it before it would manage to slither away. So he pushed the two women tipping the biggest cauldron aside and kicked it with all his might. It spun on its wheels and fell off the wall, clanking against the stone before bouncing off the monster's retreating lip and landing on the underside of its tongue.

"Talm!" Palo shouted, and she drew her bow, a healthy flame sputtering at the end of her arrow. She leaned over the side of the wall, too precariously for Palo's taste, and released the bolt. It disappeared down the creature's gullet, and the worm pulled away, screeching. It shook its huge head in distaste, but nothing more happened. It retreated from them, leveling an entire temple with one indignant roll, and closed its mouth.

"Well. We tried," Palo shrugged.

Talm lowered her bow, eyes wide. Palo worried for a moment she was about to burst into tears, as she was prone to do unannounced in childhood. _Not now, Talm_ , he thought. _Not in front of the council._ He almost reached out for her, almost patted her arm and told her to save her tears for a better time, when a muffled boom nearly shook him from the wall. A torrent of black blood burst from the worm's side, and it turned over, screaming its last. It raised its head to the sky and a fire erupted from its maw like a hideous belch. The foul-smelling flames extended as far as a city block, and as it twisted, spewing fire in every direction, the council members ducked away from the heat, covering their heads and gasping. But Palo could not help but watch the worm flail, black entrails spilling onto the streets from its ruptured side, head burning like a torch. The spectacle didn't last long, but he got a good, morbid look at it before the fire turned to smoke and the worm finally collapsed. It twitched a few times, knocking buildings to dust, before its head fell to the ground and stopped moving.

 _Gotta hand it to that worm,_ Palo thought, wiping his forehead (his hand came away black with soot or some other debris from the explosion). _It sure knows how to die dramatically._ Its passing left a strange feeling in his mouth, almost overwhelming, burning his tongue and throat like a too-large gulp of whiskey, but even such a bitter taste could not dampen his triumph.

He stood atop the battlements, face blackened, and laughed. He did not stop until Talm told him his hair had caught fire, and rushed to help him put it out.


	40. The Siege Continues

Hey all, thanks for reading, as usual! I've got some free time on my hands so I'll be updating next week as well! See you then!

* * *

"If I could sing you praises, Warrior Mother

I would sing of your copper hair pulled high,

I would sing of your many lovers,

I would sing of your honey-gold eyes.

But I cannot sing you praises, Warrior Mother,

Since your blade cut short my sighs,

Not even a glance of pity you mustered,

As your curved steel ended my life."

T.L. Malona, "Song for a Gerudo Queen"

* * *

Link stumbled back toward the fray, heart pounding in his throat. When he had handed the injured boy over to the Gerudo soldiers guarding the watchtower, they had given him more than a few looks of confusion, but they called the medics regardless. A couple women emerged from the tower and carried the boy in silence to safety beyond the inner wall.

And that was it. Again he was free to fight. As he crept back along the same route he'd taken with Impa, he wished for another injured civilian. At least then he could do some good without spilling blood. He drew his sword, walking shield-first through the streets, and resolved to talk to Impa and her father about letting him act as a medic rather than a soldier. Perhaps if he'd met Talporom before his daughter, he would've been spared the endless lessons in swordplay and warfare and instead been taught herbs and their functions, how to set a bone or bleed out a disease. But for now, he knew he'd have to walk the streets of battle, sword raised, undaunted. _I am what I am,_ echoed Palo's voice in his head. _No use regretting what I'm not._

He took the long way around, away from the noisy, dusty main streets, but still he found soldiers fighting in alleys, bodies piled on the stairs of passageways, a Hylian man trying to patch himself up inside the dried and cracked bowl of a fountain. The injured soldier's eyes followed Link mercilessly, but he did not seem interested in rising from the fountain to take on this traitor Hylian in Gerudo armor. Link tried not to look at him; he followed a familiar path through shadow and alleys, and a little ways beyond where he and Impa had parted, he found the heart of the action.

Ever since the warning bells rang, he had been afraid of seeing a familiar face. He did not want to kill a man only to recognize him as a knight he'd horsed before, an officer he'd eaten with, or a fellow stablehand who decided to take up a sword. But when he stumbled onto the scene of carnage, the only man he could recognize was one he had the least problems with fighting. Link was not afraid of his own reluctance when it came to that one. He knew what side he was on.

Tall and proud, riding a white horse and swinging a mighty poleax, General Haema mowed down the soldiers before him. His horse snorted, stomping over debris, fully armored in as magnificent plating as its rider. The general did not seem to notice Link—he was much more concerned with a giant Gerudo woman who had effectively taken out half his company. Nabru spun her spear around and faced him, wild braid swaying, and called for him to charge.

The hooves of Haema's white horse kicked up dust as he came at her, poleax raised steady. She tumbled aside, and the blade of Haema's halberd sliced through the last strands of her long braid. She lifted her spear and swiped low, aiming for his mount's knees, and its edge met flesh. Link flinched at the horse's scream as it stumbled forward, dislodging Haema from its back and collapsing into the dirt. It tried to get up again, kicking, snorting, but its blood-smeared front legs could not find the strength to level it upright. Haema rolled through the dirt seemingly unharmed, dropping his weapon. As Nabru approached, leaping over his collapsed mount, he sprang to his feet and unsheathed his sword from his hip.

He barely had time to swing it before Nabru was on him, twisting the length of her spear at his knees. He lowered his sword with a satisfying clang, and backed off, parrying the swipes and jabs of her quick and unpredictable spearhead.

Link launched himself over a few bodies, climbing over the debris of collapsed buildings, toward their duel, but he could not stop thinking about the still-scrambling horse, knees broken, floundering in the dust. He tightened his grip on his sword, and seeing Nabru handle Haema without much effort, he made his way toward the general's creature with mercy on his mind. He had spent some time with the horse before, and although it could be as rude and belligerent as its rider, it did not deserve this. He couldn't help but think maybe Nabru felling the animal was her way of paying Link back for trying to send an arrow through the face of one of her spiritual sisters in Wormhaven.

He sliced his way through about half a dozen soldiers, marching toward where Nabru and their commander fought. When the barely-trained footmen fell before him, he never stopped to make sure they were dead; he just let them writhe in the dirt, telling himself to keep going, to keep his attention on the duel ahead of him. A few well-meaning infantrymen tried to sneak up behind Nabru while she was distracted with Haema's glinting blade, but long before the tips of their swords could reach her, they invariably lost a limb or two. Link could not tell if this was through calculated strategy on the part of Nabru, or just the dumb luck of her wild movements. Either way, she remained unscathed, dancing toward Haema with her broad-headed polearm as fire might dance across dry wood.

Link did not get halfway to the horse when a clang and a deep-voiced cry drew his attention back to the duel, and he caught sight of Haema's shining helmet flying from his head, reverberating like a metal drum. He stumbled, dazed, as Nabru retracted her spear, twisting the weapon in her hands to get a good stab at his face. Her back foot slid, her hips twisted, and Link had no doubt this strike would easily make it in one side of Haema's skull and out the other. Time seemed to slow as he watched, anticipating the blow. He swore he could spy each muscle in Nabru's bare face contort in the expectancy of triumph, he could see the spear shift slightly in her clenched fists. But he could also see the way Haema, still dizzied from the upward strike to his head, lifted his open palm, raising it above his ear, almost as if he were trying to regain his balance. Link had seen that motion before.

He cried out and abandoned the struggling horse, angling himself toward Nabru, but as if in a dream, his feet were sluggish and entirely too slow. He launched himself in her direction, but he couldn't stop Haema's hand from closing, couldn't stop the archers positioned on the roofs and piles of rubble from releasing their bolts. Nabru seemed more surprised than pained to find an arrow planted in her shoulder, more disappointed than afraid when one buried itself in her thigh. She kept standing, kept readying for her strike, but as another shaft appeared in her arm, in the soft spot where her armor bent, she went still. A few arrows bounced off her breastplate, one wedged shallowly between her side plating, but she didn't seem to notice—she stood motionless in preparation for a strike she would never make. Finally, when a shaft screamed past her head in a burst of blood, she fell.

Link screamed, sword bare in his trembling hand, and raced across the last stretch of ground between him and Haema. When he hurdled over Nabru, he glanced down to see the left half of her face spattered in blood, eyes wide and still. His heart and stomach traded places when he landed between her and Haema, and he raised his shield to catch the few stray arrows that Haema's archers fired at her already-fallen form. They buried themselves in the strong wood of his shield, and one landed by his foot, bouncing from the dirt and brushing his elbow with its fly before tumbling into the dust.

No more arrows came. Link lifted his eyes over the shield, and saw Haema, now recovered from Nabru's blow, staring at him. His arm was raised, but his palm was open—a call to halt. Link gripped his sword tightly as Haema approached him, a wicked half-smile crawling across his face. A small stream of blood trickled from his light hair to his scraggly beard, dripping on his white tabard.

"You," he said, as if it weren't obvious. He seemed almost pleased. He looked Link over, in his assortment of mismatched Gerudo armor, his shining sword, his oval buckler, blue Sheikah Eye now pierced with a few stray arrows, and laughed. He was still smiling broadly when he thrust his longsword forward, batting the Eye at the shield's center. Link backed up, swinging his own blade, but Haema parried faster than he could've imagined for a man so large. Suddenly a golden pommel was hurdling toward his face, quicker than he could react, and it struck his cheek with a dull thud of pain. Brains reeling, Link stumbled to the side, raising his shield as Haema lifted his sword over his head. The next strike shook Link from his arm all the way down to his feet, and he swore he could feel his bones rattle in every part of him.

His shield split down the middle. It stopped the heavy weight of Haema's blade from severing his arm completely, but when the general removed his sword to strike down again, its edge came away bloody. Link rolled, avoiding the next swipe altogether, and wrestled the leather straps of his shield from his right arm. The gauntlet had fractured, but not entirely, and the flow of blood wasn't heavy. It felt like he could still use his arm, so he backed up, resting it on the pommel of his sword.

Without a shield, and doubting he had the strength to match Haema blow-for-blow, the best he could do was dodge like a coward whenever the blade came his way. He silently thanked Impa for all the harsh lessons, all the strikes with practice blades to the stomach and thighs, as he retreated unscathed from attack after attack.

In the heated panic of combat, Link realized he had no idea what to do next. He figured Haema wanted to finish him off himself—so he had little to fear from the archers stationed around him at this point. He could wait for Ahnadib's soldiers to pick them off and make a run for it—or he could try his luck defeating Haema himself. Either way, he could not keep up this cat-and-mouse forever, and both of them knew it. The general seemed more frustrated by the minute; his blows became heavier, quicker, his face reddened—he had lost that amused smile that accompanied his first strikes, and instead wore a grimace that told Link he tired quickly of this game.

Link thought furiously. He backed up, eyes searching for something—anything; a rock, a collapsed pillar, rubble from which he could gain the high ground and aim for Haema's face—but he found nothing close enough he could use. Haema would get to him and slice him open before he could manage to climb anything and gain the high ground, and the general was so well-armored…

Then an absurd idea arrived in his mind, right when Haema twisted his body, white cape flying behind him. A few leather straps, buckles glimmering like a promise, held his breastplate to his backplate, concealed by his decorated cape. Link did not have much time—and, thankfully, not much sense either. As Haema raised his sword, Link rolled toward him, well in the way of the weapon's reach, exposing his back, the soft spots of his legs, his neck. But he reached the inside of Haema's strike before the blade could draw more blood, and there he was, crouched under the general's billowing cape like a windblown tent. His heart beat wildly in his throat, and he pushed himself to one knee, raising his sword. The general, miffed his prey had the temerity to wander this close, started to turn, but Link's sword was quick and steady, and met its mark. He watched the leather straps break before he rolled out of Haema's way, back beyond the general's reach. Haema stepped forward, breastplate coming loose on one side with an embarrassing snap. The man halted, lifting one hand to his chest to hold the armor on, while the other shook, clutching his sword.

"You little shit!" he growled. Any semblance of his calm demeanor had disappeared entirely.

 _He's furious; that's good_ , Link thought, recalling what Impa told him about how a blind rage made one slow and stupid. If he could manage to slip under the general's opposite side and loosen the other straps, he might be able to expose a few weak spots where his strikes might meet something other than impenetrable metal. Link dived in again, hoping that the general's anger would impede his swings, addle his mind.

But Haema did not slow—he was not weakened at all by his incensed state. It seemed to quicken him, to make him sharper, more brutally dedicated to his goal. So when Link raised his sword to slice at the straps holding the other half of his breastplate, Haema, one hand on his chest, the other on his sword, struck at him faster than he could dodge.

The sword, even wielded in one hand, knocked Link's straight from his grasp. He froze for a split second, eyes wide, before launching himself away from Haema, but that split second was far too long. The general's gloved hand flew from his breastplate and gripped his throat, squeezing air from him as he shoved him to the ground. Haema knelt on his chest, digging one armored knee into his thin cuirass, pushing down so hard Link swore he could feel the metal collapse on itself. He coughed and reached with bare hands to pry Haema's fingers from his throat. The general's face was so rubicund with anger Link could hardly tell where the blood on his cheek ended and his flush began. He raised his greatsword above his head, tip pointed between Link's eyes.

He couldn't breathe. He kicked his legs uselessly, eyes following the sword tip that hovered only inches above them. Strangely enough, the first thought that arrived in his mind was how angry Impa would be with him if he got himself murdered. An ugly, gurgling sound came from his throat as the general tightened his grip, but no finishing blow arrived. Haema's grey eyes flashed angrily, his sword hovered, but he did not finish Link off, as he had promised to do so many times in the King's camp. Instead he just tightened his hold on his throat, squeezing consciousness from him. As Link's vision blurred and the world started to darken, he heard Haema's growl somewhere far above him.

"You're lucky I'm not allowed to kill you."

It seemed like a dream. The words hovered, intangible, in the darkness around him. Link started to slip away, his hands loosening their grip on the fingers that crushed the breath from his lungs.

Bells. Something sounded like bells in the distance.

With a clash and a grunt, his vision began to return. He drew in a shaky breath, throat and chest aching. He suddenly remembered where he was. The bells resounded painfully, both inside his head and out, signaling the call to retreat. He lifted his eyes, a dusty grey glow lighting up the scene around him, and he saw a shape, tall, long-haired.

The massive, bleeding body of Nabru met Haema's with terrible velocity. He did not have time to lift his sword and defend himself before the enraged Gerudo toppled him, weaponless fist raised. She struck him hard across the face, and he dropped like a stone, crumpling under her incredible weight. With each furious punch to his unprotected head, a bell rang from the city's center, like her fists were hammers of some uncanny gong. Link coughed and rolled to his side, aching, sputtering pain with each shallow breath.

Only after Haema had gone limp did Nabru seem to notice the bells. A single arrow whizzed past the bloodied half of her head, but she paid it no mind. She struggled to her feet, eyes darting from Haema, groaning and clutching his face, to Link. Her pupils flickered for a brief moment of indecision.

Link knew she could've dragged Haema back to the inner wall, following the frightened peals of the city bells. He knew she could've used the general's limp body as a shield against his own archers. Instead, she hobbled over to Link, prostrate and barely breathing, and hauled him over her shoulder. His lungs burned with the movement, and he let out a pathetic gasp as his collapsed breastplate hit her shoulder. Stopping only to pick up her spear from the dirt, she careened through the streets, gait uneven with the burden of injury. She picked off a few stragglers with the tip of her spear, lone, unlucky infantrymen who happened to find themselves in the way of her retreat. She dispatched them hastily, groaning with the effort of lifting her spear with her injured arm, and nearly tripped over their bodies as she stumbled onward, toward the bells.

Her legs gave out in an alley somewhere behind the ruins of the main market street. There were no soldiers in sight—just a few corpses hidden in the expansive dust kicked up by the battle in the main thoroughfare. The clamor of ringing swords and shouting soldiers echoed far behind the barrier of abandoned and broken buildings, and Nabru collapsed against a cracked wall, clutching her stomach.

Link dropped beside her, releasing a pained wheeze. He struggled into a kneel and examined her wounds; one arrow in the shoulder, one through the thigh—any others she appeared to have already ripped out—and a mess of blood and dangling flesh where her ear had once been.

"Don't take them out," Link wheezed, touching her wrist as she gripped the shaft sticking from her leg. "Talporom says…" he had to stop to take a breath—"you could bleed out."

She let go, scowling, and raised her face to the sky. A fresh stain of blood spread down her collar from her ear, and she shook her head more in irritation than pain. "That coward. Thinks he can win a fight by having his friends pump you full of arrows."

"He did the… same thing to me," Link managed to say. "Only… you're doing a lot better… than I did." By the length of the shaft sticking from her shoulder, he figured it had not penetrated too deeply past her armor—but he had not expected her to return from the injury as furious and strong as she had.

"I'm not gonna be doing great for much longer if I don't get to a doctor," Nabru smiled weakly.

"We'll go find Talporom when we get back."

"Talporom, huh?" She leaned, looking Link over, at his missing helmet, his cut arm, his bent breastplate. "And what about you? You've got some…" Her eyes wandered down to his red trousers, heavy with a dark stain. She smiled, and Link reddened as the realization came over him. "Didn't take my advice?"

"I… don't know when that happened," he whispered, truthfully.

"Ah, pissing yourself the first time is good luck," Nabru wheezed. "Happened to me my first battle." She groaned to her knees, letting Link help her up. He put her uninjured arm over his shoulder and tried his best to carry her weight in return for carrying his, but she was heavy and he was weak, so they both leaned on one another as they limped back toward the inner wall.

"Don't… tell anyone," he rasped. He couldn't imagine what Palo might say about that little discovery.

"Word's mum, kid." She fell silent, and they continued for a few minutes, each concerned with breathing, with putting one foot in front of the other. Link could not help but marvel at Nabru's strength, and tried his best to keep her steady as the bells rang behind the sturdy inner walls.

"You're a brave kid, coming in after me like that," Nabru wheezed as they rounded another corner. Link thought about attributing his sudden courage to the Sheikah charm that lay somewhere in his waist pocket, but couldn't find the breath to harp on about it. "But why didn't he kill you? I thought… I was way too late to save you. I was sure you were long gone."

"I don't know," Link answered, honestly. Haema's growl, still unclear and evasive as a dream upon waking, echoed in his head. He wasn't sure if he'd imagined it. Haema waited for no permission to kill any man, Link knew this—everyone did. Unless it was from…

"You fight like a sand fox," Nabru said, guiding them both along with the raspy sound of her voice. "Clever, quick. Good as any woman."

"Thanks," Link gasped. "And you… gods above." He didn't know what to say of her skill, strength and toughness. It all spoke for itself.

"I fight too much like a boar. It's my weakness," she said. She seemed to be breathing better now, willing to continue the conversation as the wall, and the prospect of safety, approached. They were within an arrow's shot of the watchtower now. "Relying on brute strength and willpower alone—" she coughed—"look where that got me." She stumbled, and Link helped her regain her balance. "It looks like I'll have to kill that coward King another day… tomorrow." She stopped for a moment to wheeze. "If Molgera grants me the strength to avenge her daughter."

Link had almost forgotten about the worm that was probably rampaging somewhere in the southern districts, but the thought made him hurry all the more. Nabru seemed unafraid of the possibility of encountering her spiritual sister, which was expected, but some of that rage, that unaccountable ire at seeing the worm used so ignobly still colored her scowl. Maybe the battle had cleared her head a little the way peaceful relaxation might clear another's, but he knew she would not soon forget the creature.

They were near enough to the watchtower that other regiments of Ahnadib's army could be seen pouring into it, or grasping the ropes and ladders their sisters on the wall lowered for them. The soldiers retreated to safety with bloodied hands and chipped weapons; many were missing helmets, gauntlets, and in a few cases, entire limbs. Those worst hurt were helped along by those who had the strength, and a few intact soldiers rushed up to Nabru, grasping her, calling to her in Gerudo. They wrestled her from Link, strong arms gripping hers and leading her back to the wall. They seemed to be praising her, admiring her shredded ear, the bolts protruding from the kinks in her armor, and they way she fell into their arms conveyed how gladly she accepted their thanks. She looked quite the martyr, being buoyed by her fellow soldiers toward safety, leaving a dramatic trail of red where her ear spilled blood.

Link was left to hobble to the wall alone, but that was all right. He was not like Nabru. He did not have the same proclivity for heroism.

* * *

Link sat cross-legged in the council chamber, squeezing pain out of his injured arm. The cavernous, decorated building that functioned as tactical headquarters also had been converted into a sort of massive infirmary. Soldiers stretched across makeshift beds, groaning, while their friends and comrades fashioned tourniquets and bandages for their spurting wounds, or raised their broken limbs above the scurry of injured fighters. A long line of women, suffering dramatically, built up around Talporom, who knelt over one patient after another, loudly cursing to hell whoever had outed him as a doctor (Link said nothing—it may have had something to do with his recent shortness of breath). Though there were medicine women to spare, the Gerudo casualties flocked to the Sheikah, curious to observe the rare sight of a male physician at work. Even in their sorry states, some of the worst injured managed to thoroughly test the limits of his kindness.

"Doctor, doctor—" a woman missing half her leg started. Talporom, brandishing a saw and tourniquet, decided the rest of the mangled mess had to go. The soldier did not seem concerned with the blade, just with smiling evilly and laying a hand on his knee. "Doctor, I have this terrible pain, up higher, right between my legs—"

"I can remove that too if you wish," Talporom replied. "But it will be with a scalpel."

The woman laughed, throwing her head back and groaning in what seemed more like amusement than pain—until Talporom started cutting.

He made his rounds, followed by a crowd of civilians and unhurt soldiers that repeatedly failed to disperse when he told them to. He worked quickly, stitching up those he could, consoling—briefly—those he couldn't, skipping those whom he decided were not in desperate enough danger, employing magic only when absolutely necessary. He stopped by Link, who struggled to remove his deformed breastplate, and looked him over. He stared at his bloodied arm, the dark bruises that rapidly formed around his throat and face, the red stains on his forehead and hands.

"You're fine," he said, and moved on.

Link suspected Talporom might've guessed he was the one who told Nabru (who then told all the others) of Talporom's talent as a physician. He wondered if the guilt was written all over his face—if so, he supposed he deserved to stitch himself up unaided. And he would've, gladly, if he could get his damn breastplate off.

The one who helped him put it on now lay in the corner, surrounded by medicine women and healers. Talporom had removed the arrows and stitched up what remained of her ear, but left the bandaging to the locals, preferring instead to busy himself with the most urgent cases. Nabru seemed content with the brief introduction to Sheikah medicine and let Talporom move on without protest. She let out one last groan before she was obscured by the solicitous Gerudo medics, eager to tend to her ear and feed her painkilling concoctions.

Link fumbled with the straps on his cuirass, glad that Nabru was too distracted to watch him struggle so embarrassingly. He had his chin to his chest, hands fumbling behind his back for the straps, but he couldn't seem to get a good grip on anything. When he heard his name called, he looked up and saw Impa, unharmed but covered in dust, standing over him. He could not help breaking into a wide smile as she knelt to assist him.

"You survived," she said. She was wearing her serious mask, cloaked in that air of Sheikah mysteriousness always present in front of other cultures. She set Bloodletter and her harp beside her and reached over to him. He felt her hands wrap around him and his heart skipped a beat. He embraced her back, folding his hands at her waist and resting his forehead on her shoulder, but with a wave of self-pity he realized she was only unbuckling his cuirass. He suddenly reddened, took his arms from her waist, and helped her pull the breastplate off him.

Breathing was easier without the pressure of bent metal on his chest, but he still could not take a deep breath without hurting. He coughed a little as Impa helped him out of his greaves and gauntlets. "This is your shield arm," she said, looking his injury over. "Did you lose your buckler?"

"Broke it," he answered. His voice was hoarse and strained, sore with effort.

Impa motioned to one of the wandering medicine women, looking for something to do now that her job was commandeered by a foreigner (a man _,_ no less), to bring her bandages. "Please don't tell me Nabru accidentally clipped you with the end of that reckless spear of hers."

Link shook his head. "Haema."

A familiar scowl crossed her face. The medic returned with bandages and Impa took them, curtly thanking her before sending her on her way. "What the hell are you doing picking a fight with Haema? You know he has a reputation for slaughter." Link shrugged, as Impa angrily cleaned his wound and dressed it. Pain shot through his arm, but it wasn't deep. Her eyes moved to his neck, where bluish-brown contusions began to surface in the shape of large fingers. Impa tightened the bandage around his arm and lifted a hand to touch his neck. "Did he do this, too?"

Link nodded.

"Did you disarm him?" Something akin to a worried sort of pride colored her voice.

"No, I…" He didn't know what to say. "He disarmed me. But he preferred… he said he wasn't allowed to kill me."

"Not _allowed_?" The look she gave him commanded him to continue, but he couldn't. He had no answers beyond that.

Palo saved him from having to try to guess. He greeted them tiredly, face blackened. It looked like some of his hair had been singed off, and the parts of his skin not covered in soot were reddish with mild burns. Talm followed in his shadow, seemingly unhurt.

"What did you do to yourself?" Impa asked.

"I fried a worm," he answered.

"Word spread that it was dead," Impa said. "I thought we just managed to wear it down with arrows."

"Nope. Poured an explosive concoction down its throat and set it on fire from the inside." Palo knelt, eyes glinting over charred cheeks. "Don't tell Nabru. At least if you don't want her to do the same to me."

"My lips are sealed," Impa said. She threw a glance Nabru's way—the woman seemed to be sleeping heavily, perhaps under the influence of the putrid liquid she'd drunk a few minutes before. She did not appear too concerned with the welfare of her injured self, much less the welfare of a sandworm on the other side of the thick stone walls.

"Have you seen Elpi?" Talm asked Impa, kneeling beside her.

"No, but I got a message a few minutes ago. She's still on the inner wall. They finished dumping mortar into the watchtowers and the gate so no one can get in. The King's men tried to break it down but couldn't. I think things have quieted down for now, but Elpi's going around shooting at their campfires with arrows tipped in explosives. Giving them all a good scare." Link did not know it was late enough in the day for fires—but he had been inside the fortified council building for a while and didn't know the time when the retreat bells had rung.

Palo folded his hands behind his head. "She must be having a grand old time. I'm almost jealous. And you," he nodded to Link, "you came out in one piece. I had bet Talm fifty rupees you wouldn't."

"He did not," Talm said, elbowing him.

Link just smiled and lowered his head, pressing his finger into the bloody spot that spread across the bandage. He didn't know why, but he couldn't help himself from causing it a little pain—perhaps it was a way to reassure himself he was still alive.

"Impa," he said, quietly. "What are we going to do now?"

It wasn't an uncommon question. Everyone in the city—the civilians hiding behind those strong inner walls, the soldiers readying their weapons for the next bout of combat, the medics making rounds, Obra Garud's council members—asked the same question.

The esteemed rulers of the city gathered at the center of the chamber, addressing that problem in hushed voices. Ahnadib stood among them, gesticulating frantically and calling for Talporom, who, buried under a mountain of casualties, sent Impa instead. And Impa, unsure of her ability to help conceive a plan, brought the rest of them. So, late in the night, when many of the soldiers and civilians had fallen asleep or now lay in a soporific stupor from painkilling opiates, about a dozen middle-aged Gerudo and a few uncomfortable Sheikah discussed the fate of the city.

"They cannot scale the inner walls," the only male member put in. "It may be a smaller circumference, but that only means we can populate it with archers more densely."

"And there's no way they're breaking through the gates," another said.

"That's what we told ourselves with the outer gate," Ahnadib put in. "And look what happened."

"This was an extraordinary circumstance. They can't possibly have more than one worm. It's a miracle they managed to secure one in the first place."

"And how long will it take the Mandrag's men to wrangle another? Weeks? Months? Who knows how long they had to work to get that one."

"It only—" Impa started, but her voice was drowned out by the bickering of the people around her.

"Yes, I have a feeling he's played his best hand already. Think of the toll it must take on his magicians to seize and hypnotize a creature of that size to do their bidding."

"So we wait it out? They have access to half the city—they're not going to run out of food or supplies anytime soon."

"Long enough to secure another worm? You see the damage it did to the outer districts. I doubt the King's men could use much of what's left there to sustain themselves."

"But—" Again, the Sheikah ambassador's words were disregarded before they began.

"We are strong, and we are prepared. We were prepared for this well before the royal army marched on the outer wall."

"He has—"

"Let the woman speak." Ahnadib's loud growl silenced her compatriots, and they all turned to Impa. The Sheikah glanced over at the matriarch gratefully before clearing her throat.

"When we found Wormhaven empty, that was only about a week before the siege. We assume that was when the King was hunting down the worm he used to break through the gates. It won't take them long to find another one, I assure you."

"What makes you so sure he's _capable_ of getting another one?"

This time Ahnadib was the first to answer. "Remember what I told you about what he found in the Haunted Waste?"

The other council members paled. "You really think he found a rova? The Colossus witches have been dead for decades."

"I don't know what other kind of magician would be able to hunt down and subdue a worm of that size."

"What, then, do you suggest we do?" one woman asked. "Surrender?"

"Never," another answered. "Resistance to the death is the Gerudo way."

"And look how many dead Gerudo are around you," Ahnadib said. She gestured to the hall, filled with the scent of blood and metal, the hisses and slight groans of injured soldiers. "What does resisting to the death mean to you? That we are entirely wiped out? That every last one of our daughters dies at the hands of the Hyrulean army?" She pointed to Impa and the others standing silently behind her. "Ask the Sheikah. Ask them what it means for a culture to truly fear extermination."

All eyes turned to Impa, and Link could see her body tense. She seemed to think long and hard before answering, reluctantly, "Ahnadib is right. The best thing to do is—"

She didn't finish before the council erupted in angry babbling. Impa stood in silence, absorbing the verbal blows, until they grew tired of her stoicism and turned on one another. Some entreated—"Think of our daughters"—others retaliated—"Our _daughters_ will detest our cowardice if we kiss that spawn of Ganond's feet"—some threatened—"If we accept surrender, there _will_ be consequences"—others spoke on behalf of the opposing forces—"They will not accept surrender either. You know, Ahnadib, what the King's soldiers are saying: 'It ain't over till the fat lady dies', and they mean _you_ "—some reasoned, some pleaded, and others burst full of curses and righteous anger.

After a few minutes, Impa turned from the bickering council. She looked at her companions with a sad frown, and retreated, leaving the stubborn group of old merchants and soldiers to decide their own fate.

* * *

It wasn't the first night sleep had evaded Link, but it certainly was the worst. He almost longed for the nights in Kakariko where the hooting birds and rustling trees had kept his eyes shot wide open well into the morning. He had adjusted to the sounds of nature. He could not adjust to this.

The incessant groaning of injured soldiers filled the hall. Every once in a while, one would wake up from her stupor and cry out in pain or fear—another might mutter endless nonsense to herself to keep awake, another tapped her armored foot against the stone as she squeezed her newly missing arm in invisible pain. The medics shuffled and swore all through the night, ripping bandages, quieting moans and popping corks off bottles of laudanum and henbane. Somewhere in the darkness a toddler, perhaps a child of one of the councilwomen, cried furiously, and would not be comforted. The conversation that filled the hall was sharp, accusatory, violent—councilwomen, warriors, merchants argued in the shadows of the loggias and grand halls, messengers came and went with news of the civilians and military in the inner districts. It was almost as frantic as the battlefield itself; whenever Link opened his eyes and turned over, pulling his cloak tighter over him and worming closer to a half-sleeping Palo and his tranquil heat, he would hear an argument, a cry for mercy from the gods, or worse—the distant, hair-raising boom of a battering ram against one of the gates on the inner wall. Link had never heard the sound of dread before.

Talm and Impa had gone with Elpi to the wall with a regiment of worn soldiers. Nabru slept heavily, aided by anesthetic concoctions, blissfully snoring as her medics changed the bandage around her missing ear. Palo had fallen asleep shortly after having his mild burns treated by Galra—who had wrestled the honor away from a young nurse better trained for the job. The dancer now hovered over Nabru's sleeping form, hand-wringing, as her mother bickered endlessly with the rest of the council.

Link had wanted to go with the women to the wall, to escape the sounds of moaning soldiers and panicking public servants, but Impa insisted he stay behind and rest his injured arm. So he lay in the corner next to Palo, waiting for sleep that never came. He was exhausted; every part of him ached, and he wished he could forget about the pain and retreat into dreamless peace, but he could barely close his eyes. He could only try to ignore the throbbing pain in his arm and the even more disturbing sounds around him.

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Talporom found the time to escape from his patients. When he sank against the wall next to Link, he lay his staff at his side and crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes were ringed with tiredness, his wrinkles had seemed to deepen in a matter of hours. He had washed his hands, it was clear, but there were still signs of his latest surgery between his fingers, under his nails.

"T… Talporom," Link started. The Sheikah's red eyes snapped down to his, and he gulped. "Do you… do you need help?"

"Do I need help?" he repeated, almost as if the sentiment was incomprehensible to him.

"I can help you. When you heal. I want to learn."

Talporom shook his head and closed his eyes. "I barely have the energy to sew a stitch, much less instruct a layman on how. I can teach you one day; today is not the day."

"I learn fast."

"I know you do. Impa told me all about you." Talporom scowled tiredly down at him. "You don't want to be a healer anyway."

"I do. More than I want to fight."

Talporom sighed. "How many people have you seen die today?"

"I… I don't know."

"Can you count them?"

"I think so."

"I can't. That's why you don't want to be a healer." Link lowered his eyes and Talporom sighed. "More often than not there's nothing I can do for them. I've become very adept at delivering bad news. It's almost easier to fight than to heal, I would argue. A warrior need only defeat an opponent, not kill. He doesn't need to linger to watch a death. That's what the healer is for. He's the one who has to get his hands bloody. He's got to stuff the entrails back inside, he has to break bones back into place and hold people down while he saws through them. You don't seem accustomed to that sort of thing."

"I'm… I'm not," Link confessed. He could barely watch Irma slaughter chickens.

"The world demands violent things of us, Link. You've already learned this. But trust me, it is easiest to swing a sword and not think about the person on the other end. Healing is much harder."

Link lay back down. Talporom, having finally managed to shut him up, leaned against the wall and relaxed. He immediately fell into a dead sleep, mouth dropping open, and Link watched him breathe for a few minutes before turning over on his side and closing his eyes, wishing he had enough control over himself to plunge into immediate rest. But he just tossed and turned, trying to block out the sounds around him, the throbbing of his arm, the nausea in his stomach.

When a rough female voice startled him upright, he wasn't sure if he'd even been sleeping. Before him, hovering over a half-woken Talporom, stood a Gerudo warrior he didn't recognize. "Elder Talporom," the woman said again, and the Sheikah opened one eye.

"I'm not an elder," he answered.

"Talporom," she continued. "Ahnadib wishes to talk to you. You will want to gather your tribe's fighters and let them know. The council of Obra Garud has come to a decision."


	41. The Fate of the West

"Every province bears the scars of war; even the Sacred Realm of legend has endured battles fought on its fields of light. There is no land untouched by violence—except, perhaps, for the Hill Provinces, but they are so small and inconsequential there is little of worth to fight over."

Golo, Goron Traveler

* * *

It was late summer, although it is always difficult to tell in the desert. In all seasons the winds blow hot and dry in the day, freezing in the night. Poets often describe it as a death-wind, a gust that can kill a man slowly as it wears down his bones, or quickly as it throws him from a tower or camel's back. But there is no denying the beauty in that harsh wind, saturated with sunlight and the smell of spices, the fresh scent of a distant oasis, or the sound of a good fight.

It also carried rumors, news, whispers and lies. Word of the siege of Obra Garud spread across the desert as wildfire might spread through the fields of Lanayru. With it came stories of the Hyrulean King's legendary victory—it was said he rode Molgera herself through the city gates, and when the citizens and soldiers looked upon the spectacle, they all dropped to their knees and surrendered immediately. Of course, the official reports sent to the merchants and politicians around the Territories (now, they all supposed, it was officially a Province) spoke of a more realistic narrative.

They described the overpowering smell of worm's blood as it flooded the outer districts, black as night (they did not, however, speak of the question of whether worm's blood flowed naturally dark or if it had been scorched by the fire that had killed the animal from the inside). They told of the disassembly of the creature, the harvesting of its tough, segmented plates, its springy bones and shining teeth. They illustrated the utter destruction of the city, and the need for rebuilders, blacksmiths, engineers and masons. They also told how, after days of hopeless resistance, of holing themselves up in the inner city and tossing arrows and insults alike at the King's intrepid men, the Obra Garud council emerged from their hiding place with a treaty. The reports and letters, propagated in Gerudo and Hylian, spoke of the arrest and impending trial of the architect behind the city's defenses, Ahnadib edh-Yadooran, and a number of her culpable compatriots. They spoke of the few civilians that trickled out the western wall, sneaking from the city's veins and passages to freedom before the King's army closed off the outer wall. They spoke of mothers carrying their children deeper into the desert, of fighters and infantrywomen gripping their spears as they retreated from their lost city, to set up camp somewhere in the sands, planning retaliation.

What they did not speak of, however, were four foreigners, tightly wrapped in Gerudo civilian cloaks, that slipped into the desert, and instead of heading for hamlets of family, or to safety from the King's reign, went north, toward the mountains. Their cloaks lapped at the sandy wind like fire. Strips of thick cloth covered their faces, and billowing hoods kept sand from their hair. They trudged along the crests of dunes, gaits exhausted but determined, heads turned down, focusing on the harsh route ahead. Slowly, stopping only for a few hours to sleep when the day was hottest, they made their steady way toward the distant bare mountains, to the Hill Provinces beyond. They had no horses, no dromedaries or other mounts. They inched toward their destination on foot, carrying their supplies and weapons on their backs. They wasted no breath on idle conversation; they traveled in silence, under the cover of night and more than one Sheikah shadow art.

Messenger birds flew above them with news of the fate of the desert, arriving to and from coops and towers faster than the travelers could ever dream of walking. When one would raise their eyes to the stars and see the dark form of wings overhead, they would quicken their pace just a little, as if that would make any difference. They knew that each day, though they left miles of tracks between them and Obra Garud, there was inevitably still a long way to go.

* * *

Talporom had been the one to send them off. In the early hours of the morning, when the council had officially drafted the first lines of the terms of their surrender, the old Sheikah doctor had gathered the four of them. His sleeves were still stained from his latest surgery, and his brows cast shadows over his war-weary eyes. "Daughter," he rasped. Both Talm and Impa had raised their eyes to him, but the younger sister lowered them almost immediately. It appeared that when Talporom addressed the two formally, he invariably spoke to the elder. "You probably have fewer doubts than I of where this will end."

Impa nodded in understanding.

"Then you know why you must leave, and why I must stay." His eyes wandered slowly from his eldest daughter to her curious companions. "Impa, you know where you have to go. Inform these three of the circumstances after you leave the walls of the city—we do not need any Gerudo soldiers overhearing news the Mandrag will later be able to interrogate from them."

Impa bowed slightly, but Link could see the uncertainty cross her shadowy features. Her father lay his large-knuckled hand gently on the top of her head. "Trust me to survive as I trust you. We will meet again. We always do."

He gifted them cloaks and food, flagons of water and instructions from knowledgeable patients about the fastest and safest route to the northern mountains (they had to go on foot, since it would've been impossible to sneak out mounts from under the watchful eyes of the occupying army). To his daughters he bequeathed a terse kiss to the forehead, to Palo a stern clasp on his shoulder, and to Link he gave a brief but intriguing farewell.

"You stay for a minute," the man had said as Link made to follow his companions from the great hall of the council chamber, out into the quiet, dark streets of the city. Link turned, clasping his cloak tighter around him, the weight of his pack heavy on his shoulders. "That strange piece of metal you told me about—do you still have it?"

Link nodded.

"Keep it close, keep it safe. When you go down the mountains and get to Roan, you're going to split up with Talm and Palo at the crossroads. Leave it with them, and make sure they are careful with it." Link nodded again, and Talporom smiled. "Take care of my daughters."

"I will."

"And don't be reckless. Let them take care of you too."

Link did not have to reassure Talporom that he would. He had heard many lessons about the essence of comradeship from Impa, and how Sheikah worked best in pairs or teams. They did not make much of a habit of sending someone alone on a mission, nor would they abandon one of their own by himself.

Which is why, when the four of them left, Elpi stayed behind. "I'll keep the old man safe," she promised the sisters. "I know what it's like to lose a father and I won't let you go through it." She smiled thinly, clearly resisting the urge to muss Talm's curly hair, instead settling for a deep bow before rejoining her kinsman by the Obra Garud council.

The quiet exit of Talporom's daughters concerned no one. No heads turned at their departure—the council was absorbed in arguments over how to deliver their treaty, medics and soldiers were concerned only with the management of pain, Galra and Nabru had disappeared from the hall altogether, perhaps to a better medical facility or to a safe place where the daughters of councilwomen fled in events like this. The entirety of Obra Garud was so preoccupied with its own fate, no citizens noticed the four escape into the windy night. Fortunately, neither did the King's men, who prowled the outer streets looking for absconders like so many mice in a maze. When they burst from the city into the desert, cloaks billowing like relieved sighs, they did not turn back to contemplate the fate of Obra Garud.

Only when they arrived at the first nameless village in the Hill Provinces did they have the luxury of worrying about the city. When they climbed past the southernmost barren hills of the province, they found streams and lakes, and best of all, a small but accommodating town. When they arrived at the tiny hamlet's edge, the only person they could find who concerned himself with Obra Garud was a little brunet boy, the son of the village priest. The rest of villagers did not seem too concerned with the fate of their neighbors to the south, only with what little crop the arid mountains would yield to them that season.

Impa had called the kid over after seeing him emerge from the small church's loft, carrying the scent of messenger pigeon. He seemed happy to oblige the strangers, since it appeared travelers in the region were an unexpected and welcome distraction from his routine of scribing and farm work.

"Surrendered without a fight," the boy told them proudly.

"Really?" Impa raised an eyebrow.

"Yessir. Took one look at our glorious King and fell on their knees, the lot of 'em. At least, that's what my brother wrote to us—he joined up and sends us home letters and money, sometimes."

"Anything else important he wrote?"

At this, the boy eyed them suspiciously. "You deserters or something?"

Link could spy Impa smiling at the child's narrowed gaze. "Scouts."

He continued staring at them for a moment, sizing them up. His eyes lingered on the dark skins of the Sheikah, but they did not boast the red-tinted hair of any Gerudo lineage. And then there was Link—the lone Hylian, innocuous enough, with the unthreatening smile of a Lanayru peasant. "You should stay at the chapel; my dad'll be able to tell you more, I think."

The child's father, a widower priest, resided in the village's tiny house of worship. He told them little that they did not already know from the boy's message, but included the news that the woman who had orchestrated the opposition to the King, the wormsilk tycoon Ahnadib edh-Yadooran, was set to face trial sometime in the near future. According to the priest, it may have taken the letter a few days to arrive so she might have already received her sentence.

The news did not sit well with Talm. While they rested in the small abbey that night, lodging courtesy of the village priest, she wore a sour face. The torches on the wall flickered weakly as she unrolled her bedding, illuminating angry eyes and pursed lips, red tattoos wrinkling with the effort of a scowl.

"I still think Ahnadib could've done it," she growled.

"Done what," Impa said. It was less of a question and more of an admission—she might've known where the thread of conversation would lead, and found it easier to humor her sister than to resist her.

"You know what. Driven off the King." She threw her bedding down beside the empty pews and sat on it, crossing her legs and laying her elbows on her knees. "He lost far more soldiers than we did, and we even staved off his worm. I think we could've done it. If you hadn't convinced the council to surrender."

Impa grit her teeth. "You can't blame me for the fall of Obra Garud, Talm."

"I'm not, you _know_ I'm not. I'm just saying—"

"Ahnadib herself supported the decision. If anyone convinced the council to surrender, it was her. Besides, it was her choice to accept my opinion in the first place."

"She wanted _Talporom's_ opinion. Not yours. But of course you speak for him. You always do."

Impa let out something between a growl and a sigh. Link could feel Palo tense up as he leaned forward slightly. He wore a calm face, as if that could cool the ire rising in both sisters. "If you ask me—" he started.

"We didn't," Talm snapped.

He backed off, sighing, as Impa folded her hands under her chin and gave her sister a poisonous stare. "Let me end this before it begins. The reason I, and not you, can speak on our father's behalf is because he trusts me to say what is proper. It is because I act as I should, do my duty as I should. It's because I do not waste my time dressing in silk gowns and attending the theater."

"What has _that_ got to do with anything?" Talm hissed.

Link wished, fervently, that he could sink into the stone below him, to disappear and end up anywhere but where he sat. Palo's body language, slow and subtle, expressed the same desire.

"You have too much of our mother's old habits in you, Talm. If you do not engage in the Sheikah way of life, you've no right to speak for us."

Talm's mouth dropped open. She stared at Impa for a moment, a look of something between rage and horror in her eyes, before pushing herself off her bedroll and promptly making for the church's creaking front door. Link's eyes followed her out, but like the others, he sat still, heart thumping in his chest. When the door creaked shut, he turned to Impa and Palo, looking for cues. Palo just shook his head and untied the straps on his bedroll, and Impa stared expressionlessly at her hands.

"Will she be all right?" Link dared to ask, after a few long seconds of consideration.

"She will," Impa said. "I've said much worse to her."

"Well, that's arguable," Palo smiled bitterly.

"She's worried about our father. And Elpi, and Galra, and the others." Impa unfolded her hands, sighing. "We all are. But she does not get to take her anxiety out on me. Remember what Talporom told us before we left? We must trust them to survive as they trust us. Otherwise, everything we've worked for will fall apart."

She lay on her bedroll and stretched out her long body, heaving a dispirited sigh. Link reclined beside her, folding his hands across his chest. "What's going to happen to Obra Garud?" he asked.

"I don't know," Impa answered.

"Well, if we're just going on what commonly happens after a siege," Palo started, "chances are, nothing much worse than the shitshow that's already happened. Half of the place is already destroyed. There'll be food shortages, violence, the King's army will no doubt strut around harassing and violating citizens as they please."

" _Palo_ ," Impa hissed.

"He asked."

"I… did," Link admitted.

Palo cleared his throat. "I suppose our glorious King will execute or imprison council members that prove problematic to him—like Ahnadib—and replace them with ones of his choosing. He'll stick around until stability is restored, then sit his smug ass back on his throne and let the wormsilk taxes roll in."

"Is that true?" Link looked at Impa for guidance.

"More or less," she sighed, folding her hands behind her head. "You've read about all this before, in the elder's library. About war, occupation, annexation. Though it was quite a lot to remember all at once."

"It's different than in the books."

"It is."

"It's nastier than it is in the books," Palo said. "And we can expect to see a lot more of that sort of thing. We've lost our most powerful allies. Without Ahnadib and the help of the Gerudo army, we don't have much hope of stopping the King from marching on the former provinces, including Eldin." Link nodded solemnly. From what Ganondorf had told him on their desert sorties, he did not strike him as man to stop halfway to reunification. "But we Sheikah still have a few friends all over the country. We might be able to scrape by. At least, until you two find our royal sapling. If we can prove to the people that they still have a scion of the old family, who knows how many factions would be up in arms in our favor."

"You're planning too far ahead, Palo." Impa closed her eyes and her breathing came deep and steady. "We need to focus on what to do right now. And that is rest."

Link stared at the church's small, rounded ceiling, at the crude but heartfelt mural of Hylia descending from the clouds to give the gift of life to her people. Rain fell from her white robe, sun shone from her hair, crops and flowers sprang where she waved her hand. Around her neck hung a golden chain, and from it dangled a familiar triangular insignia. Men and women in simple clothes fell to their knees before her, raising hands in praise. All seemed well for the mountain people in the mural.

It was not a particularly interesting painting, but instead of drifting off, Link found himself staring at it well into the night. After a few hours, he heard the church door creak open, and closed his eyes, feigning sleep. No one else stirred as Talm crawled to her bedding and lay down in defeat.

The next morning, she spoke only as much as necessity dictated. She trudged behind them as they descended from the village, down the rivers and shallow mountain valleys, silent but still smelling of resentment. Link did not know what he could say to her, or what he should. She did not seem to care for his sympathetic looks or react to any nonverbal gestures he sent her way. So he decided his time was better off spent mulling over his own problems.

Impa had told everyone shortly after they left Obra Garud the news of the possibility of a new scion of the royal family. Talm had seemed unmoved by the information, but Palo itched to get back to the Capital and right the wrongs of the previous autumn. He doused his fire when he learned he was to go back to Kakariko with Talm. It did not die without a few sparks, however—even when Impa invoked her father's name, a name which usually granted immunity to questioning, the deadseer was not satisfied. He was reluctant to accept that his current mission was to deliver what he assumed had been nothing but scrap metal to the elder in Kakariko.

Link would've gladly gone in his place. He would've loved to march back up into the clear mountains of Eldin, to see the village in full harvest, to again stand at Irma's side in the kitchen as she sliced vegetables, to wake up early to feed the chickens and worry about nothing more than what he would read and who he would spar with that day.

But he was going to the Capital instead. As they descended from the arid hills into the wide fields of Lanayru, he sensed the city get closer with each step. He could almost feel the oppressive smog on his skin, could almost smell the infinite scents of townspeople and their perfumes, almost see the silently moving lips of the wordless crowds around him.

When they approached Roan, an agrarian town that straddled the border between the Hill Provinces and Lanayru proper, the worried visions and perceived smells only grew stronger. When they agreed to settle there for the night before splitting up at the crossroads, Link figured he should take a few moments to breathe the fresh country air a bit more deeply. He knew it would not be long before he would find himself in the smoke-choked air of the Capital once more.

Roan was a little town barely worthy of a place on the country's map, but it served to mark the border between the lesser provinces and the Capital's land, making it something of an intertribal cultural hub. Folks from the hills came down with their furs and wooden trinkets, speaking a plethora of familial languages, selling tubes of the area's unique alcohol and bartering for livestock. Lanayru citizens dotted the streets, mud-stained and carrying barrels of hay, leading reluctant goats across the dirt. It almost surprised Link to find himself again in the company of people his own color—he had gotten so used to the brown-skinned and highly social citizenry of the desert.

"You look troubled."

It wasn't too difficult to make out Impa's voice from the din around him. She grasped his wrist, sternly but kindly, and led him away from the main thoroughfare of Roan and into the quieter streets. "You're nervous about returning to the Capital."

"Well… yes." He could not deny it. It was written all over his face and stitched into his hesitant body language.

"You'd much rather go back to Kakariko with the others, I suppose."

He looked at his feet. Somewhere to his right, Talm and Palo ignored him, preferring instead to head to the inn where they could rest their tired legs and fill their stomachs. They did not seem concerned with his hesitancy. Perhaps they were simply used to it.

Impa, however, read his silence as one might read words. "You're wondering why you get to come on such an important mission." She looked around her, and when she saw no one was watching, lay her hand on his shoulder. "It's because you knew her the best, out of any of us." Link lifted his head, images of the yellow-haired girl's smile obtruding his vision. "You have looked at her face longer than anyone else. You, out of anyone, will be the most likely to recognize her features in the face of another."

For some reason, the urge to cover his eyes came over him. He lifted his hands to his face and hid an expression of what may have been sadness, may have been bewilderment or disappointment, or may have been something else entirely. He had functioned so well as a deaf boy by interpreting the nuances of others' faces and emotions, and even he could not name what coursed through him at that moment.

Impa patted his shoulder, urging him silently but in no uncertain terms to pull himself together. He repeated that sentiment in his head over and over again that night, and well into the morning, but with each passing moment the city seemed to loom over him, growing bigger by the second. He reached into his pocket and twisted the Elder's charm of courage in his fingers all through the night, telling himself that it had gotten him this far, and it would get him through whatever came next.

His anxiety only worsened when it came time to say farewell to Palo and Talm, who were to take a straight southeastern route through the swaying grasses back to Kakariko. Talm spoke little, but left him a quick peck on the cheek. She grinned at his slight blush before disappearing behind the inn, where a stableman waited with some horses. Palo, however, was reluctant to leave Impa in the care of the inept Hylian stableboy.

But she reassured him with more than a few words. When he gripped her arms to say farewell, she told him to wait a minute, backing up and reaching over her shoulder. He nearly fell to his knees when she unbuckled Bloodletter and handed it to him.

"Take care of this for me," she said. "And don't tell Talporom I gave it to you instead of Talm."

Link had never seen Palo so shocked. Eyes wide, mouth agape, he received the sword from Impa with much hesitancy and more ceremony. "Are you sure?" he said. His voice was quiet, almost reverent.

"You know how it is," she said. "A sword that big draws attention to itself, and that's the last thing we want in the Capital."

"I'll be sure to keep it safe," Palo answered, and a crooked smile broke out on his face. Link was unsure of the nature and power of the ritual he'd just witnessed, but when Palo buckled Bloodletter across his back, rising to thank Impa, it reminded him of the knighting ceremonies he'd only read about in the elder's extensive library. He felt almost obtrusive, almost voyeuristic, standing here watching them reach out to one another.

Palo spent a long time holding Impa's shoulders, whispering words in her ear that Link couldn't make out. She laughed occasionally, her red eyes wandering back to him as Palo spoke. He leaned toward her, and for a moment Link suspected he intended to plant a kiss somewhere on her face, but quick as the flicker of a bird's wing, he disappeared, and Link and Impa were left alone on the inn's creaking porch.

When it was their turn to set off, Link's feet fell despondently on the dirt road, images of the Capital running through his head. With each conjured vision, his heart beat a little faster. But he couldn't pin down exactly what he feared in the Capital. The King was in the desert. Haema was with him. As far as Link knew, there was no other person in the vast neighborhoods of the country's biggest city that meant him harm.

 _But what about Talon? What about the other stablehands, or the barmaid and her husband?_ he thought. _I can't just waltz by and say hello._ Maybe this uncertainty in his gut came from the realization that his old acquaintances might not recognize him. Or worse, they would.

The anxiety stayed with him, emerging from the regrets and sadnesses and worries he harbored for the desert and its fate. With every hesitant step away from Obra Garud and onto the Capital, his heart beat a little harder, his head pounded a little more. He didn't know what or whom he'd encounter there, but he knew he wasn't ready for it.

* * *

In the back room of a dusty gambling den, Impa conjured their disguises. She and Link undressed and donned new clothes, leaving any garments that might appear Sheikah or Gerudo on the shelves of that cold room.

In the shadowy alleys of ripped, smoke-choked tents, she had bought a few pilfered professional's clothes, pristine and white. From a half-drunk man in a gown, sporting the latest cosmetic trends from the Capital, she bought month's worth of brownish cream and light dyes. Finally, in the basement of a half-toppled church (which counted as the front room of the gambling den in which they now hid), she had met with a man, bald and scrawny, who in exchange for more gold than Link could've imagined, handed her a thin piece of paper and wished her the best of luck.

Link did not like the smell of Oldcastle. He did not like the crowds of thieves, the way the children clutched at his clothes and begged aggressively, and he did not like the stares the scarred, bearded men gave them as they passed by, like dogs honing in on a pair of hares. He especially did not like the gathering of slave traders on the outskirts of the city, striking deals with palace soldiers. Between their hands, branded as Link was with the mark of Dragmire property, passed small, parentless children, women with wide frowns of desperation, men and boys that looked too much like him. He did not like anything about the town, but Impa had said this was the best place to gather the things they needed—materials used for distraction, espionage, deceit and double-dealing.

At the cracked mirror in the small room, she applied a sparing portion of the powder she had bought earlier that day. She closed her eye and rubbed it over her tattoo until there was no sign of it on her dark face. She stared at herself intently, but when she spoke, it was not only to her own reflection.

"It is a time of war, regardless of the King's recent victory," she said, deepening her voice a little. "Security will be tight, and the guards will be on the lookout for Sheikah." She tried a subtle accent, then discarded it for a better one. "Especially considering Sheim has been wreaking havoc among the upper class." She turned to Link and motioned for him to lower his collar. He did, and she leaned down to examine the mark on his left shoulder. She reached into a tub of lighter powder, running her finger along the edge before applying it to his skin. He watched the mark disappear slowly, and touched it lightly after she had finished smearing the weird cream on his shoulder. "I wish I could make this more permanent, but I'm not nearly as good at this sort of thing as Talm. For now… reapply this every day. And remember, you're not you."

Of course he knew he was not himself. The deaf stableboy who had worked under Talon was long gone—drowned at the bottom of the palace moat, or killed in battle in Obra Garud, or succumbed to some sickness contracted at the King's camp in the desert. However that stableboy had died, it didn't matter. What mattered was that he was not here now.

Link was a student of medicine, from Old Riko, seeking an apprenticeship in the city. To his great surprise and relief, he had met a doctor on the road on the way up from Lake Hylia. Impa was a somewhat experienced practitioner from Riverton, trained in the arts of water-healing and herbalism. Instead of trying his luck with possible surgeons in the Capital, he decided to take what chance gave him and offered his services to this traveling physician.

Link was quite obviously Hylian, which would cast few aspersions on his racial legitimacy. It was difficult, however, to determine Impa's nation of origin, or even her sex, but she (or he, Link supposed one could easily mistake) would claim to have had a Gerudo mother. She did not have the tattoos to mark her as Sheikah, and although her whitish hair may be rare for a half-Gerudo, it did not strike Link as too odd a combination. There was little they could do about her red eyes (at least, Impa said, without Talm around to work some of her magic), but he supposed on a dark day they could pass for brown.

When they emerged from the back door of the gambling den, he could hardly recognize either of them. Impa wore the same serious face she always did, but atop the white coat of a traditional Hylian physician, it seemed a different sort of austerity. Her giant sword was now in Palo's tender care, but she wore her harp in its leather straps across her back. It was the only part of her that seemed out of place for a doctor, but it was a less conspicuous weapon than Bloodletter, or even the knife she had hidden at her waist. Link carried one as well, tucked safely in his shining boot. He hardly thought he looked natural in the stiff collar of a professional, but he had to admit he at least looked nothing like a stableboy. When they made their way up the road toward the Capital, he found that the shabbily-dressed peasants and palace slaves, poor travelers and humble guardsmen tipped hats, averted eyes, or greeted them formally. Shortly after Link left Oldcastle, he was so surprised to find himself at the receiving end of such respect he turned once or twice to see if the approaching travelers were gesturing to someone behind him. He quickly discarded the habit when Impa reminded him to act as others would expect him to. So he focused on maintaining his disguise, practiced his life story in his head, and politely gestured to other men and women when they greeted him.

At the southern gates of the Capital, the complex smells of the city nearly burned his nostrils. In one breath, he could gather particles of the black smoke that spouted eternally from the cranking factory lines, the stench of sewage and the sweet scent of parfumeries, the odor of people and their animals. He could almost taste the acrid air on his tongue. It was all familiar to him—uncomfortably so.

What was different were the sounds that accompanied the overpowering smells. Even from outside the city walls, he could hear merchants chanting prices, the barking of excited dogs, men and women's laughter, the squeak of rusted machinery, the rattle of cart wheels on cobblestone streets. He almost lost himself in the noise of the city, when he realized the nearest guardsman was questioning him.

"Forgive me, I didn't catch that," he said.

"I said, where are your papers?"

"Ah, my… my mentor has them, right over there."

"Your mentor?" Even under the shadows of the guard's helmet, Link could make out a curious look. The sentries at the entrance of the city wore the uniforms of the King's guard, but they seemed younger than most Link had encountered before—perhaps the more experienced men had marched to the desert with the rest of the royal infantry.

Link pointed to where Impa stood, speaking with another guard. The boy under the helmet waved Link away, preferring to let his compatriot deal with them. Link approached Impa and glanced over her white-clad shoulder. The guard held their papers in his fingers, examining them closely.

"Doctor, huh?" the soldier asked.

"From Riverton. I'm staying with my ailing aunt—met this young man on the road. He could learn a thing or two about palliative care during his stay."

The guard grimaced. He folded the papers and handed them back to Impa, who slid them neatly into her coat pocket. He frowned at the lyre slung across her back.

"What's the harp for?" he asked.

"Just a hobby. I don't go anywhere without it. Relaxes the patients, too."

"Yeah? Don't see too many of those instruments around here." He chuckled to himself a little. "Must be nice, when you're sick. To hear your soul being played out as it leaves your body."

Impa laughed, deeply, genuinely. "You'd be surprised the miracles it can work."

The guard shook his head and waved them through, oblivious to the truth in Impa's words. With a few dream-like steps, Link passed under the portcullis, through the open gates, past the shadows of the thick brick and stone, and found himself again in the stone streets and bustling chaos of the Capital.

He closed his eyes and held his head. He felt dizzy, his legs suddenly weak. But he didn't falter. He just followed Impa down the city's main thoroughfare. He kept his eyes trained on the heels of her buckled shoes, ignoring the yelling merchants around him, the jostling travelers, the passing workers and lounging artists. He tried not to look around him, tried not to meet the gazes of the people who scurried past him. He just clutched his stomach and bit his lip, suddenly wondering why it was that he felt he had just come home to an empty house.


	42. Words in the Wind

"Of all the races in the world, the Hylians are closest to the great goddess, for why else would we call ourselves _Hylians_ if not for her hand in our making? We have always been her most dedicated servants—and perhaps this is why she saw fit to confine the nefarious Gerudo to the wastelands of the west, to exile the wily Zora to the riverbeds, to imprison the savage Goron in his maze in the dark mountains. Perhaps it is her blessing that allowed us to crush the Sheikah under our heel. All I know is that the world is as it is because of her, and she has looked upon her own race with favor from its conception."

Sir Colin of House Ceyland, "The Knight's Credo"

* * *

"This place is safe, as far as I know."

Sheim, Link learned, was a tall Sheikah man with a permanent scowl. He escorted them through the shadows like a cat might creep through grass, eyes darting this way and that, posture held slightly hunched as if he were ready to spring at any moment. His voice was low, more a growl than anything, and his tattoos sat thick and dark across his nose and under his narrow eyes. His feet touched the ground noiselessly, and left no prints on the dusty street. Link knew an innocuous-looking Hylian must've appeared terribly conspicuous following such a man, but none of the city's passersby seemed to notice them. Perhaps Sheim's aura of secrecy was so strong it had spread to Link as a consequence.

He led them up a small flight of rickety stairs which creaked so loudly under Link's feet he thought they would break (Sheim, of course, made no sound when he ascended), and fiddled with the lock on a shabby metal door at the top. He showed them into a dim room, smelling of rot and creaking with age.

A single, heavily barred window on the far wall cast prison-cell shadows over the room's dingy, moth-eaten mattress. In the window's insufficient light stood a small wood stove, caked in grime, and an empty metal chamberpot sat in the corner. Link could hear the scurry of a rat somewhere in the shadows, and every surface was sprinkled with a thick layer of dust. He made no comment about the state of the place; he just followed Sheim and Impa into it and closed the door when instructed.

"I have been doing risky business," the older Sheikah started, "but not from here. I am certain the authorities have not pinned down my hiding place, but if they have, know that it's a safe distance from this district. You will not find trouble here. At least, none that isn't of your making."

Link wondered if the place where Sheim hid himself was a great deal more comfortable than this cold, moldy room, but again he held his tongue.

"Thank you," Impa said. "Will you be in the city much longer?"

"No. My business with Doctor Balras and his associates has been concluded. I am needed in Silk, or so the elder tells me." He paused for a moment, looking Impa over. "Have you heard news of your father?"

"No. Not yet."

"My daughter sent a letter. She said they were all safely out of the city. Though… there is little hope of reclaiming it as of yet. And still no sign of a royal heir. I'm starting to believe that our lot in life consists of eternally taking one step forward and two back."

Impa shrugged. "Either way, we'll end up somewhere eventually."

A weird expression crossed Sheim's face, and it may have been the darkness of the dingy room, but it took Link a moment to realize it was a smile. "Keep that optimism alive as long as you can." He reached into his cloak and took out a piece of parchment, folded neatly. "I am to leave you with the information I gathered about the person in question. It's not much." He shook his head, half amused. "I'm sorry I couldn't leave you with a better idea of what to do."

Impa grasped the paper and pulled its edges. With each subsequent unfolding, her frown widened, until she held before her a piece of parchment the size of a large map. Link crept behind her to look over her shoulder, eyes scanning the intimidating wall of text that adorned the paper's yellowed face. It seemed to be some sort of list, although the Hylian, neatly inscribed, was almost too small for him to make out.

"These are the names of all the relevant male factory overseers in the city. One of them is the child's father—well, at least he's a man who may _think_ he's the child's father. I have been too busy with my own work to sniff out a lead for you. But I trust you can do it yourself."

Impa stared in bewilderment. "This will take years," she muttered.

"We do not have years. Keep that in mind."

She sighed and folded the paper. Sheim strode to the door and opened it, glancing over his shoulder. "This is a most crucial task, Impa. I wish you success." His eyes wandered to Link. "You and your… apprentice."

He seemed somewhat amused with himself when he slammed the door in a shower of dust.

* * *

The platens of the newest model of printing press thumped ostentatiously on the other side of the large window. Link pulled his sack of vegetables closer to him and watched the steel body glimmer as it pumped at the paper below it, watched the sweating, white-skinned arm of its operator pull and push the gold lever. With each tug a dozen copies burst from the bottom of the machine, falling into the open satchels of a factory line of dust-streaked children.

"Hey mister, you here to buy one?"

The voice had come from somewhere below him. Link saw a boy at his feet, papers folded under his arm. He had the face of a buck-toothed rodent, wide-eyed and eager.

"If you give me your address, we can deliver it. New system."

Link shook his head. "Just one, please." A few coins fell from his hand to the boy's.

"What's with the cloak, mister? You think it's gonna get cold today?" Link muttered some excuse for his odd dress and took the parchment, but before he could leave, the boy tugged on his sleeve. "Oi. You want another one for free?" Link did not answer. The boy looked both ways and surreptitiously slipped a thin strip of parchment into the folds of his gazette. He bid farewell with a mischievous smile and a salute Link did not recognize, and disappeared into the crowd of passing citizens.

Link left the busy thoroughfare and into the shadows beyond the market. He slipped into the narrow alley between two crumbling apartments and sank to the ground, removing his hood and laying his bag of provisions next to him. Glancing about to make sure he was alone, he spread the periodical over his crossed legs.

The city was much the same as he'd remembered, apart from its consistent and uncomfortable loudness. He'd been surprised with the generous wealth of information that had passed him by when he'd last walked these streets; the tones of the speakers around him, the malignant and eternal growl of the factories on the city's outskirts, the written word. He was astounded by the sheer volume of street literature he'd failed to notice as an illiterate stableboy; signs posted on buildings, pamphlets passed from hand to hand, news spat from a printing press still-hot into the greedy fingers of noblemen, calls to arms published by the military organ, advertisements for haberdasheries, wanted signs, anonymous poetry, misplaced grocery lists, love letters thrown to the wind. He had passed them all by before, on his way to and from the well or the pub with Talon, and crushed the words under his feet because he'd had no use for them.

Now, each was precious to him, especially those that concerned the fate of the Gerudo Territories. The paper he held in front of him now, dotted with neatly printed Hylian, spelled out the recent events of the desert's timeline. His eyes followed the symbols closely, slowly, and his mouth moved when he sounded out the words. It took him a full minute to read what Impa could skim in a few seconds, but he walked himself through a recapitulation of the siege of Obra Garud with great earnestness, noting all the inaccuracies in the account. He read it twice, staring until the letters blurred.

No word of Ahnadib, of her famously beautiful daughter or her infamously stout bodyguard. Just a repeated account of the King riding through the city on the back of Molgera herself, a list of executed insurgents, a detailed account of the laudable bravery of the soldiers and the delighted submission of the locals. The papers painted pictures of women bowing at the feet of their conquerors, rescued from under the heel of a money-corrupt city council, freed from independence and bejeweled with the new laws that would govern what was now known as the Desert Province. Link's heart threatened to sink into his stomach, as it had every day he'd read the periodicals. But he knew he would come back the next day and devour the same propaganda as if his life depended on it. He was desperate for any news, even if it was obviously false.

The small pamphlet the paperboy had snuck into his folded gazette fell onto the stones by his crossed ankles. He picked it up, squinting at the bold, almost unreadable text. It was thick, urgent, and definitely not printed on the same press as the news and announcements the city guard posted to the gates and town squares. It took him a while to recognize the rarer characters.

He understood nothing of its content. But he folded the papers and slipped them up his sleeve anyway. He pulled himself to his feet and glanced both ways down the alley before sidling into it, raising his hood and ignoring the sun pounding at his overheated back.

He tried to imagine himself as Sheim, slipping through the cracks in the city, blowing past the noses of suspicious guards like dust on a breeze. But his reverie shattered when he tripped over the edge of his tattered cloak and nearly tumbled headfirst into a group of giggling teenagers. He barely recovered his footing and fled from their amused stares, back into the shadows of the lower districts.

The lair Sheim had found for them was in a neighborhood Link had only visited once—passed through wholly by accident. After countless beggars' hands clasping at his legs and one attempted robbery (ended only when Link tugged his loose collar and revealed his person and everything on it belonged to royalty), he had told himself to never set foot in it again. But now, when he strode through the streets darkened with manure and grime, no one touched him, no one bothered him. Perhaps it was by virtue of his hurried pace, or his dark coat—but perhaps it was only because after he had tripped over it, he'd adopted a hyper-aware gait to avoid repeating that mistake.

Link drew the cape about his knees when he ascended the creaking stairs to their small abode, glancing behind him to ensure he entered the room unwatched. He pushed the door open with a harrowing creak, and found Impa crouched over the parchment Sheim had left them. The list of names, infinite and seemingly growing longer with each thorough examination, lay flattened on a splintery slab of wood balanced across four stacks of bricks (an improvised construction Impa told him would have to pass for a table). She did not lift her head when she heard him enter—her red eyes appeared glued to the words.

"I bought some food," Link said. He lowered his bag to the floor. They would have to eat it that night or save it in a high place, if they didn't want the rats that scurried around the edges of the building to get to it first. Even now he could almost hear them, leaving their tiny, primitive handprints in the dust around the neighborhood.

"Good," Impa replied. She stayed fixed to the table, running her hands through her short hair.

He sat down beside her, and pulled the papers he'd collected from the sleeve of his cloak. "I brought some news, too. If you can make sense of it."

She tore her eyes away from the list and frowned at the papers he offered her. "Any new information about Obra Garud?"

"None. Just how they're singing the King praises." He picked up the small pamphlet the boy had given him and looked it over once more. "Do you know about the Knights of Hylia?" he asked.

Impa's forehead wrinkled as she raised her eyes to him. "Where did you hear about them?"

"Here."

She took the pamphlet from him. " _Know your people; know your place; know your potentate,_ " she read, before shaking her head. "They get worse each year."

"What does it mean?"

"It's an Ordish phrase originally. In those lands, with their eternally skirmishing noble houses, it's used to remind people that their loyalties should lie with their own house, their own blood. Their own race." She crumpled the pamphlet and gently tossed it aside. "A few years ago the sentiment spread to Lanayru. Turns out the Capital has its own division of devotees to that phrase." She closed her eyes for a second. "Link, you've probably read all sorts of things since we got here. How many of them do you believe?"

Link shrugged. "Not many."

"Good. Perhaps you're finally developing a healthy sense of skepticism."

He thought for a moment. "It's easy to doubt words on paper. It's harder to doubt people."

"We'll fix that soon enough," Impa chuckled. It pleased him to see her smile, even if it was a tired, half-hearted effort. "Come, look at these names. Do any of them strike you as familiar?"

Link did not need to read them to know. He shook his head. He was unsure why Impa asked—she knew as well as he that a stableboy would not know the names and titles of factory overseers.

"At first I thought to exclude any foreign names from our list of persons to investigate. It should be a Hylian man, if he's to believe the scion of the royal family is his own son or daughter. But then again, sometimes children do not resemble their parents." She paused, glancing over the first few names once more. "Some of these are decidedly Gerudo."

At her long silence, Link started to fidget. "And…"

"Remember in Obra Garud, what Galra said?" It struck Link as an unreasonable question. Galra said many things, often, in quick succession. She prattled worse than Talm. "This is why we _eavesdrop,_ Link." Impa's disappointment crept into her expression, and Link begged himself to remember something relevant. He couldn't face that frown for long.

"She said… she said that she had many brothers," he started, recalling the shining day when she had taken them to meet Nabru. He wondered what that glittering market street looked like now, cluttered with debris and crawling with the King's soldiers. "She said one of them lived here."

"If I recall correctly, she said he ran a factory of some sort."

"Wait…" Galra's rapidly moving mouth, the shape of her words, rushed back to him. "It was a silk processing plant."

"Of course," Impa said. "Any son of Ahnadib would be in that business. And he might be an excellent source of information. About his compatriots, business partners, which friends have had unexpected children recently. That is, if he's still around. If I were a son of the King's enemy I would probably skip town." She ran her finger down the list, tapping Gerudo surnames and titles. "I'm assuming most of those with a hand in the wormsilk trade are Gerudo. As far as I know, all the people on this list are male. So one of them may be Ahnadib's son."

"Shouldn't he share a name with his mother?" Link asked. He knew hereditary naming was a mostly Hylian practice, but if the Dragmires' had adopted it, other powerful Gerudo families might have followed suit.

"It's not likely, unless he was born in the same place and at the same time of year as Ahnadib." Impa rubbed her forehead. "Besides, he might've altered his name when he moved to the Capital, or adopted a title…" she paused to sigh. "My father told me that unless one is Gerudo herself, she has little hope of understanding Gerudo onomastics. We're going to have to find him without the help of his mother's name."

"Do you think…" Link started. "Do you think he knows if anything happened to her?"

"We cannot linger on that question. Now, what else did Galra say about him?"

Link rubbed his chin. "She said he was ugly," he offered.

"That doesn't help us much."

"She said he writes her letters, and promised to get her a spot at the opera."

"So he's literate and has some friends in artistic circles." Impa leaned back and scratched under her eye lightly, dislodging some of the powder that hid her mark. "What can we learn from that?"

"Well…" Link thought of the streets of his childhood, where he spied the workers walk and where the silver-gowned women and well-dressed men of the upper classes wandered, the festive lights around the opera house in the dark winter, the warm glow of bars and gambling lounges, windowsills piled with snow. "There are a few places the singers and dancers go to drink."

She twisted her mouth in thought, crossing her arms. "It's better than following around silk plant foremen until one of them confesses to be the son of Ahnadib." She turned to Link. "Well, then. Let's eat something and put on our best clothes. Tonight we shall attend the opera."

"Really?" Link's eyes lit up.

The look on her face mixed both amusement and pity. "Of course not. But we will pretend we did and then follow the performers to the nearest pub." She raised an eyebrow at his clear disappointment. "Next time you're on a mission, if you want to distract yourself with frivolities, go with Talm."

* * *

It was not difficult to pry information out of the tippling performers. Link and Impa arrived at the bar, well-dressed and full of pretense, easy with coin, loose-mouthed, and the clientele easily followed. They started by slowly introducing themselves to one another (Link found his heart lifting at the exercise—and wished their first meeting had been as pleasant and incidental as their enactment), then shifting the topic of conversation, along with nearly everyone at the bar, to the war.

Impa guided the dialogue as Link might guide a horse around a corral; there was nothing but grace in her manipulation as she slipped between topics, smooth as water. With each glass she ordered, her head nodding in agreement or bobbing in comfortable drunkenness, she coaxed and teased words from eager mouths. Dancers, singers, musicians came and went, a few intoxicated performers asked Link or Impa to treat them, a few others offered that favor—but with each curve of the conversation, they honed in closer on their goal.

A honey-colored woman with thick yellow ringlets gave them what they sought. She had the long, droopy-eyed face of a morose hound, but her smile came easily and her eloquence was not dampened by drink.

"I heard… well," Impa started, either genuinely wasted or putting on a rather convincing front, "That Gerudo woman… what's her name… had a son who ran a factory around here. I wonder how the war has… you know… affected his business."

"Oh, you must mean Innar. His factory is on the other side of town." She quieted, seemingly losing herself in a brief lapse of attention. "Innar. Dear Innar."

Another woman, uninvited, swooped in on the conversation and dropped a quick message before fluttering away. "Sweet, dear Innar! Him and his letters! I'll never forget him."

The honey woman shook her head. "I haven't spoken to him in years. I don't know how he's getting on."

"Oh, are we talking about Innar?" a third dancer piped in, arm-in-arm with a white-wigged man. "I heard he moved away. Because of the war, you know."

Her companion shook his head. "No, someone robbed him and burned down his factory."

"No they _didn't_ , that was a different plant in the same district. And it was an accident."

"Well, I haven't seen him in ages, so who knows?"

"He probably went back to his family."

"No. He was still bugging the sopranos a month ago. He just moved to the other side of the city after the war took a bad turn. Less conspicuous, you see."

"Where did he move?" Impa asked.

"No idea," the dancer laughed. "You think rich men like him share their addresses with people like us? They've got to keep the rabble off their front steps, you know."

"Has he any relations in town?" Impa asked.

"Not that I know of," said the honey-colored woman. "His only family is—or _was_ , I suppose—in Obra Garud."

Impa leaned on the bar and ordered another drink. As casually as she introduced the topic, she moved to another one, engaging the woman until one of her acquaintances, a man with dark hair and a deep voice, tugged at her, asking for a dance. The bar's quartet had stopped playing hours ago, but she humored him, smiling as he led her away.

About an hour later, when Link and Impa stepped out into the cool autumn night, all semblance of drunkenness had left her. He was still reeling a little from what he had consumed (for the sake, he told himself, of his disguise), but he managed to keep up as she trotted toward the outer districts. They fled from the well-lit cobblestone streets of the city center, back to the dirt alleys and their ramshackle hideout.

She lit an oil lamp, and he watched the cockroaches scatter from the light. She sat down at their tiny table and looked over the list of names once more, tracing her finger along the rows until she landed on the one she was looking for: "Innar edh-Garudan," she read aloud. "We've found him."

Well, they hadn't _quite_ found him. It appeared some more hunting would have to be done, so Impa took him to the city records hall (a large, well-known building, but one Link had never ventured inside, since he never had any use for it). He wandered its dusty, near-empty halls for what must've been hours, and pulled up the addresses and reports of every factory a certain Innar edh-Garudan had worked in. They left with his birthdate, military rank, marital status, income, political sensibilities (less than ideal—he was on more than one blacklist), and house number. It appeared he lived, or had lived during the last census, at the end of a street in a district Link had passed through often while serving as a stableboy.

They decided to pay him a visit, as was Sheikah habit, in the dead of night. Link did not protest the decision—he actually preferred to take a brisk walk than lie curled on their ratty mattress, trying to sleep through the scuttling of base creatures in the walls, the shouts of an inevitable domestic dispute, and the rumbling of the sleepless factories. Initially, he had offered the mattress to Impa out of some misplaced sense of politeness, but when he awoke to find a rat nibbling at the end of his finger and a few insects creeping around in his shirt, he had crawled back to it and begged her to let him on. After jolting awake, knife in hand, she was more than happy to share; she was as displeased as he was with the prospect of him always waking noisily in the night. They had found some bricks and creaking wood planks from the garbage heap behind the apartment and raised the mattress from the floor, ceding that battleground to the vermin. They shared a pair of ratty blankets, and when the nights had started to cool and frost crept across their single window, Link found himself often waking up with his back pressed against hers, freezing feet seeking warmth in the crook of her knee.

It looked as if it would be a cold winter. Even now, though the festival was still a couple months away, Link had to pull his cloak tighter around him to keep out the chill of the night. The clouds of autumn passed overhead, billowing bellies illuminated by the fire of the Capital's factories and the sickly light of its infinite street lamps. The towering buildings around them, mansions by no stretch of the word, glowed eerily in the cloud-light, tiny gardens reflecting green against their tall windows. The neighborhood slept deeply, for there were no prostitutes or card sharks parading the streets offering bets or services, no fights, no songs spurred by smoke or drink. Just lifeless brick, wrought iron fences and long, glinting panes of glass. Link followed Impa through the quiet dark, toward the end of the street, covering his nose at the sudden puff of ashy air that must've drifted in the wind from the factories on the other side of the city.

He resisted the sneeze with quiet words. "What if we got to Innar's house and saw he has a baby that looks just like… her?"

Impa did not shush his whispers. "It would save us much time and effort. Too much to be plausible, though."

He shrugged. She was right—there was no way the gods would smile on them that generously. He knew as much as anyone the gods did not grin, they only simpered, and were ever stingy in their blessings, coy and withholding like the Capital's most practiced coquettes.

Impa walked in silence for a few seconds. "Do you smell that?" she asked.

"It may be the factories. The wind carries it." The burnt scent seemed too close to have wafted over from the coal and lumber-fueled fires of the industrial district. And it did not seem entirely fresh—not like the debris-choked belches of the city's smokestacks or the pungent odor of a newly-built Sheikah bonfire.

When they approached the end of the street, they discovered the source of the scent. They both slowed, dragging their feet across the polished cobblestones. Impa broke the length of silence that hovered over them.

"When did this happen?"

It could've been any time. The war in the desert had been won for weeks. It could've happened before the siege of Obra Garud, when Ahnadib toted the banner of her people, proudly spitting in the face of the King. It could've happened in any of the long weeks Link and the others spent walking steadily from the desert to the mountains, and then from the mountains to the Capital. It could've been that when he and Impa were settling into their new abode, Link shooing the rats but somehow unwilling to kill them, Impa carving Sheikah runes of silence into the doorframes and windowpanes, someone had lit a torch and thrown it into Innar's garden. It could've been in the days when Impa scoured the neighborhood for potential threats or rumormongers, when Link, dressed as a medical student, went out to buy the herbs and metal tools necessary to keep up their disguise, that someone locked all the doors to the mansion at the end of the street and set fire to it, along with its occupants. It could've been only days ago, when Impa and Link discussed Innar's whereabouts with his artistic acquaintances, that someone raided the man's house like they had once done to the yellow-haired girl's father and burned all the evidence of an attack.

Or it could've been an accident. A candle left burning overnight, an irresponsible servant, a cooking disaster. Rumor had it he'd had several cats. One could've easily knocked over a lamp.

But when Impa approached the remains of what must've once been a stately mansion, kneeling into the ashes for clues, she discovered it was far from a mistake. She pulled out a small message, scrawled in angry Hylian, nailed to a stake and stuck in the ashes of the mansion's foyer.

Quietly, teeth gritted, she read it. "'Son of a traitor whore.'"


	43. Fading Warmth

"All the riches in the world cannot save a sinner."

Arigor, Priest of Hylia

* * *

 _You'd think after all the money I sank into this city, they'd put me up in better lodgings._ Ahnadib knew the council whose pockets she had lined was long gone, scattered to the wind or now firmly wrapped around the little finger of her enemy. Those she'd curried favor with now lay either in cells beneath the city or at the feet of their new King, fervently boot-licking. They would not vouch for her, they would not stand in protest when the presumptuous Hyrulean King put her head on the chopping block. They would not come to her aid or rescue. But they could've at least provided her with some silk pillows on which to rest her weary old ass. You'd think, after acting for so long as the city's only leader with any semblance of a backbone, her cage would be a fair sight more gilded.

She had little more than a pile of straw to call a bed, her chamberpot filled the room with a heavy stink, and the only distraction available to her was to pick at the remaining paint on her broken nails. The bars of her cell were thick and smelled of rust, her meals came twice a day (surely a lady of her generous size would warrant more than _that_ , but when she'd tried to argue this to the guard, he'd only smacked her across the mouth). So she endured. She wrung her hands and chipped her nails and plotted and endured.

After all, this was her fault. She had argued for surrender. She had insisted that Obra Garud open its inner gates to the King and his army. She had told her fellow council members to hold their tongues, to let the King trample their city in order to preserve their own lives and those of their people. She just didn't expect her compatriots to sell her out so quickly. Perhaps the blood of outlaws still ran too thickly through her people to warrant trust between them. No honor among thieves, as the saying goes.

Without her riches, without her allies and without her loyal guards and soldiers, she had nothing to do but pick at her nails and await her execution. Half her sons were dead. Who knows where her daughter was (if the girl knew what was good for her she'd have left this damned city weeks ago). Her house had most likely been looted, her servants abused or killed, her monuments and likenesses smashed to pieces. She could almost feel her gold statues being melted into coin, the King's smug profile stamped onto each one. She clutched her chest. She did not know if the burning sensation inside her was a reflection of everything she had loved and worked for being thrown into the fire of conquest, or just indigestion. Whatever it was, unless someone sprung her soon, it would be over by the week's end. So would everything else in her life, for that matter.

A clattering in the hall told her she had a visitor. Though her stomach rumbled terribly, she knew it was not time for another meal. Perhaps it was another Hylian guard come down to taunt her, or worse, someone higher up. She would not mind if it was a councilman come to negotiate the possibilities of leniency. But if it was the King or that… woman he had with him—well, she'd rather take an axe through the neck than have to look into the stinging eyes of that wretched witch. There was something ancient and snakelike about her that made anyone in her presence fidget uncontrollably. Anyone except, of course, Ganondorf.

The distant rattling gradually diverged into distinct sounds; the guard's heavy ring of keys, the swinging of chains and gates as he pushed them aside. His lumbering footsteps, now familiar to her, were accompanied by others—Ahnadib pricked up her ears and tried to form an image from the mere sounds of feet on stone. The lightness of one pair of footfalls and the heaviness of the other forced two contrasting images to emerge in her head; one was the pessimistic thought of the King and his witch coming that way, the other—

"Mother."

The sound of her only daughter's voice, as usual, was like music to her. Or a sweet silence after a seemingly endless cacophony; she could never really decide.

"Galra." Ahnadib looked her daughter over, at her unharmed face, the silk cloak that covered her shoulders, her golden shoes—she seemed to be as she had always been, perhaps a little more frantic (a few hairs out of place, the dearth of the usual purple tinge on her lips, just the slightest hint of puffiness around her lovely yellow eyes). Her companion, wrapped in a thick cloak and hunched over as if in permanent gastric pain, seemed a little more agitated.

"Leave us," Galra told the guard. To Ahnadib's surprise and pleasure, he did. When the jingling of his obnoxious ring of keys disappeared back up the stairs, the figure beside Galra dropped the cloak and stood upright, cracking the kinks in her back as she drew herself to her full absurd height. Nabru's eyes were dull with fatigue, and a bandage was wrapped tightly around her head, darkened with dried blood where her ear used to be.

"While I am pleased beyond words to see you are both alive," Ahnadib started, "I am curious how you managed to get that guard to obey you all of a sudden."

"How do you think?"

Galra's face told her nothing. As far as Ahnadib could guess, it could've been one of several ways. Galra still probably had a small fraction of their once-impressive fortune stashed away with her wherever she had been hiding. She also had more than an abundance of feminine charm. But then again, Nabru may have just roughed up the guard until he agreed to let them in. Ahnadib realized she didn't care how they got in. Her daughter was here, alive, in front of her. "How have you been faring?" she asked.

"Better than you. It's been hard, but I have Nabru with me. So far we've been able to avoid any violence."

"Violence?"

"The King's men are rounding up everyone they don't like at this point. People who are loyal to you, high-profile dissenters, councilwomen who won't give up their power." She made a face that looked like a pout. "They haven't come for me. I don't think they know or care who I am."

"Well don't look so _upset_ about it. You're worried you're not good enough for them?" Ahnadib laughed bitterly and Galra reddened. "They'll come for you soon enough. You're my daughter. And you have Nabru with you. No doubt there are many men in the King's army who would love to exact revenge on the giant that personally took down half of their comrades. I heard you even broke the face of the King's pet general."

Nabru flashed a sadistic smile. "Aye, he won't come out in public, I hear. They're trying to put his nose back together."

"Why didn't you kill him, though?" Ahnadib asked. She knew it was a wasted question—but she also knew that if Haema was dead he would not have something to say when it came time for her trial. The whole nation— _every_ nation—had some idea of the man's reputation. His decisions were informed only by his unrelenting bloodlust. He would certainly cast a vote in favor of her execution.

Nabru's smile faded. A guilty expression crossed her face, but she did not come up with an adequate answer before Ahnadib could continue. "You spared him to save that Hylian boy, is what I hear."

The warrior seemed caught in a web. "Well… yes, mistress. I couldn't stand to watch a helpless young man die like that."

It seemed an odd decision for a woman like Nabru, who had watched countless young men die at the tip of her own spear. Ahnadib wondered if Nabru could've fallen in love with the child in some way. He did look enough like a girl that it could've tipped her sensibilities in favor of that particular member of the male sex, but Ahnadib doubted it. Nabru liked her women exactly that— _women_ , with shapely hips and breasts, big lips and long eyelashes. A scrawny nymph like the Hylian stableboy did not fit those criteria.

"In either case," Ahnadib started again, "Haema will no doubt hasten my journey to the executioner's sword. Before that happens, Galra, you must disappear."

"That's not going to happen," Nabru said. "We'll get you out before then."

"Daring talk, but I doubt even you could lift away these bars."

"I could always kill the guard and take his keys."

"Listen to yourself, Nabru," Galra growled. "He's the only reason we got in here. If you kill him and come gallivanting out of the dungeon with my mother over your shoulder, the rest of the army comes barreling down the hall after us."

Nabru rolled her eyes.

"Listen, Galra." Ahnadib squeezed her plump arms through the bars and gripped her daughter's wrists. "If you want to survive this, leave your robe and jewels and escape the city. Curse my name and declare yourself no daughter of mine."

"No." Galra's features seemed to sharpen in the shadows. Her voice had the same edge to it she had used to win so many arguments with her brothers. _Gods above,_ Ahnadib thought suddenly, _I have no idea how many of them are still alive._ She had to concede it wasn't surprising; she often forgot how many she'd birthed in the first place.

"Go find your eldest brother. He will help you." She thought for a brief moment. "And if you cannot find him, for whatever reason, I have a few good friends in the city who will gladly help any child of mine. Find the statue of Nayru in the southern district and walk thirty-three paces east—there will be a door in the alley. The man by the fountain should know the password if you tell him dire straits call for dire recourse."

"To hell with that. I'm not going to just abandon you. Not like the Sheikah did."

"Those Sheikah did what I told them to. And you will too. Listen, Galra. Go to the city. Save yourself. And for all the gods' sakes, if you see the Sheikah there, do not be hostile to them."

"How could we not, after they abandoned us in our hour of need?" Nabru hissed. "It is clear to me now the Sheikah only look out for themselves. And so must we."

"She's right, mother," Galra said.

"We have to focus on our own country first," Nabru continued. "The politics of Hyrule are none of our business. As soon as the King leaves, we'll topple the council he appointed and reclaim our city."

"Nabru, you say such foolish things," Ahnadib growled. "You don't think the fates of our nations are intertwined? You think that what the King does here and what he does on his throne in Lanayru are unrelated?"

"The King can go suck a pair of figs," Nabru said, perhaps because she had nothing better to offer.

"If you want revenge against the man that lay siege to your city and enslaved your spiritual sister, then you will do as I tell you. Nabru, you will escort Galra to the Capital and make sure she arrives unharmed. You will deliver her into the care of her brother and wait for me."

"Wait for you?"

"Yes. I still have friends in this place, though not many. I'll pull a few strings and see if I can get myself out of this mess. Then I'll meet with you in the city, and we can talk."

"Talk about what?" Galra shook her head.

"About taking our country back, you little fool. About destroying the man who took everything from us." Nabru raised an eyebrow. "We may have lost our army, but there are others who share our goals, here, and in Hyrule. The Sheikah, for one. Other factions in the city. Friends of your brother. So go find him."

Her daughter pursed her lips—gods, she looked so much like Ahnadib did when she was younger (excepting that greedy glint of a future monopolist in her eyes; that ambition she completely lacked). "Mother, I will go to Hyrule on one condition—"

"I know, I know. That I live. You're so trite, Galra." The clinking of the guard's ring of keys sounded somewhere to her left. "Get out of this city, and wait for me. I'll find you again." Ahnadib guided her daughter's hand through the bars and pressed her lips against it. As she kissed Galra's smooth skin, she could not help but feel as if it were the last chance for her to do so. When she let it go, Galra dropped it to her side, hung her head, and left. Nabru rewrapped her cloak around her and made to follow, but Ahnadib bid her stay. "Nabru… I do not want to say this in front of my daughter. But if they kill me—"

"They won't."

"Fine. But if they kill me, you'd better make sure those assholes pay for it. That's an order."

Nabru bowed her head. "Yes, my mistress."

* * *

 _Know your people; know your place…_

Link had been unable to find the child that had sold him the city's yellowed periodical the week before. He lingered around the neighborhoods of the new printing presses, repeating the strange phrase in his head, but when he managed to get his hands on a paper, there were no cryptic messages attached, no propaganda not approved by the royal censors. Link stayed a while, lounging in the squeaking, wailing presses' shadows, but he found nothing of interest. He was starting to look suspicious in his hooded cloak and aura of silence, so he crept back toward the outer districts, unread paper tucked under his arm.

When he reached what he had come to refer to (generously, and only in his head) as his house, he opened the door to find Impa cross another man off her list.

"No children for that one," she said to herself, or to him, as he closed the door. She lifted her eyes to him. Dark rings colored the skin below them, and he could almost see her tattoo under her fading makeup. "And what have you been doing?"

"I got another paper," he said. "I wonder if any of them say anything about the fire." Impa tilted her head. "The one at Innar's place."

She deflated. "You're still troubled about that?"

"Of course."

"If some royalist faction were responsible, you're probably not going to read about it in any paper. They try to keep things like that tightly controlled… though rumors always spread. And if the Crown arrested him officially, they wouldn't have resorted to arson. He would've been executed—publicly, to serve as a warning." She put down her pen and crossed her legs. "Don't look so devastated, Link. He's probably still alive."

"Why do you say that?"

"Think of the note left in the ashes of his home. Why would you leave a message for a dead man? Either he's alive, or some of his friends are—people who might feel threatened by the fire."

"So where do we find his friends?"

"We don't. We have to give up on Innar, Link."

"Why?"

She dropped her pen, turned to face him. The exhaustion of the day, no doubt spent tailing a man and for nothing, showed clearly on her face. "There are dozens of insurgent factions in the city. Can you tell me to which he might've gone? Give me a name, a place. Give me a wild guess."

Link couldn't.

"That's why we give up on Innar. I doubt even his friends know where he fled. I have a feeling it will be as difficult to find him now as the royal heir, so we might as well focus on the more important one." She again positioned herself over the list on the table. "I've tried talking to a few of the men on our list, but none of them are particularly chatty. And mentioning Innar only frightens them into silence. No one wants to be associated with a traitor's son." She sighed. "Maybe one of them will assist us in the future. But for now, we have no help. It will be a long road."

She gazed at her feet, and Link saw the corners of her mouth fall. Her stare seemed dazed, overwhelmed. At that moment, darkness fell across the neighborhood; the sun snuck behind the far wall of the city and suddenly, an irreversible cold crept over the tiny apartment. Somewhere outside their door, down the street, two cats fought loudly.

"Rest tonight, Impa," he told her. He was unsure if it was the first command he'd ever given her. She did not seem concerned about his stern tone.

"I'd like to. But I shouldn't. Neither should you. We both need to go out and follow a few of these men."

"I'll make something to eat," Link said.

"There is little time to waste, you know."

"It's freezing. I'll put some wood in the stove. We can start again in the morning."

"Perhaps…" Her eyes shone with a complexity that made her expression unreadable. It appeared as if she might be deep in thought, but the opposite seemed equally as likely; it would not surprise him if she were merely too tired to think at all at this point. She stayed suspended in her odd stupor for a few long seconds. "Perhaps that is best."

Link stoked the small fire in the corner of the room. As the orange light filled the tiny, creaking space, he heard the unmistakable skittering of cockroaches retreating into the baseboards. A shiver ran up his spine, despite the feeble heat from the stove.

"It's getting cold," he said. Deep in his bones he knew it would be a harsh winter, though it had been a long time since he had been able to read his keener senses in lieu of hearing. The noises of the city only worked to interrupt his cloud-reading, his animal-watching, his deep meditation on what winds arrived from what corner of the town and how fast. But it was clear to him that winter would arrive early, and eagerly.

Impa appeared beside him, unpacking the food he had bought that day (he usually had to journey out into the market daily, since the rats and roaches would not permit any provisions to sit overnight). He placed a small pan over the stove and added the vegetables, in the order Irma had taught him. He wished he had an egg or two.

Impa left him to the cooking, and sat down on their small mattress, pulling her lyre onto her lap.

"Are you going to warm it up in here?" Link asked.

"I'll try. I'm…" She lay her fingers on the strings but didn't move them. "I don't want to play too loud or for too long. There might be men in the King's guard who can sniff out magic. Casting too many spells around here might draw attention to us."

"Even with the runes you carved on the doors and windows?" Link asked.

"Even with those." She sat for a minute, staring at the wall opposite her, eyes running along the contours of the crumbling plaster. After a moment, she drew her fingers across the strings and a slow, needy sound emanated from them. It resembled the weeping of some foreign bird, and Link suddenly lost his appetite.

Impa put the harp down. The room was warmer—if only in temperature. Something else had filled the space; it made Link loosen his grip on the pan of vegetables, it made his skin go numb.

"I'm sorry," Impa said. "It appears I'm not in the mood to play."

Link hoped she was at least in the mood to eat. He took the vegetables from the small stove, and breaking a loaf of bread, sat down with her at the creaking table. She seemed about as interested in the meal as he, but they both ate, if only to deprive the greedy mice and insects of their leftovers. When they had their unsatisfying fill, Impa lit a candle beside the bed and sat on it, folding her hands.

Link reclined beside her. He watched the candle flicker, watched the cords in the back of Impa's hand as she wrung them. "The heat is leaving," he said. It was obvious enough—what little warmth her strange playing had produced billowed out the window like a slowly expelled breath.

Impa just lay down, pulling the wool blanket over her. "I know. But I can't get up every hour of the night just to play harp."

Link lay down beside her, close to the candle, so he could smooth down his news and read it by the dim light. It appeared nothing of consequence had happened in the last few days. Obra Garud was settling down, but no word on Ahnadib. The news was terse, uninteresting, and contained no flyers or announcements by various secret groups or political insurgents around the city. Link folded the paper and pushed it under the mattress, where other discarded periodicals lay gathering dust, corners nibbled away by various scavengers.

"Should I blow the candle out?" he asked Impa.

"No. We could use what little warmth we get from it." She pulled the blanket up to her chin and sighed, staring at a black stain on the ceiling (Link could not imagine how such a dark, expansive splotch could spread its way up there, but he preferred not to think about it). "The heat just goes so fast. Sheim could've gotten us a better place to stay."

Link made a noise of agreement.

"He thinks very little when it comes to the comfort of others. He's so resilient himself, he hardly notices things like cold."

Link lay in silence for a while. "Is that why he works alone?" he asked. It would make sense, if many Sheikah worked in pairs, that someone as discomfortingly flinty as Sheim would, for the sake of himself and others, choose to face the world alone.

"After his old partner died, he rarely let anyone else accompany him. He insists they'll only get in his way. And he's not wrong. Palo has been on a few missions with him and claims he's only served to sabotage everything."

"I can't imagine that," Link said.

"Clearly you haven't known Palo long enough to catalogue his failures." Link saw the blanket rise and fall as she heaved a silent sigh. "Compared to Sheim, we are quite pathetic. He's the most Sheikah of all of us, I would argue."

Link pulled his frozen feet up to the warmer regions of the blankets. He turned over, tucking one foot under his shin, wincing at the cold that crawled up his leg. He stared at Impa's back, at the slight rise and fall of her breath, and had to stop himself from reaching out and touching it.

"How do you become a Sheikah?" he asked. He wasn't quite sure what desperate recesses of his brain the question had come from, but it intrigued Impa enough that she rolled onto her back to stare at him. He felt trapped all of a sudden.

"Why would you want to become one of us?" she asked.

"I don't know," he admitted. "Because you're the only ones… no… others have been kind to me. Talon, and Gorman at the stables. Some of the guards and the other stablehands. Nabru, and Galra." Impa raised an eyebrow at his meandering. He took a deep breath. The candle was suddenly very hot at the back of his neck. He feared his hair was on fire for a hallucinatory, stupid moment. "But the way you talk about each other, the way you act, it's different… I was always taken care of as long as I was useful. Everything was about obedience, and doing favors. No one would die for you. But I'd d—" He cut himself off when an amused grin suddenly stuck itself to Impa's face.

"You don't want to return to the stables, then?" she asked.

"I did return, once," he answered. "When the King caught me in the desert. I know now it's not my home. I might miss it… but now… I haven't visited it, since we got to the city. I'm afraid to."

"And with good reason. If there's anywhere you shouldn't go, it's near the palace."

"I know." He thought of Talon and pulled the sheets up to his chin.

Impa turned on her hip, resting her head on a cupped hand. She stared at him for a long, uncomfortable moment. "There aren't too many ways to become a Sheikah. It's not unheard of for foundlings to be raised as one of us in Kakariko—look at Elpi, she's white as the moon. Hylian through and through. If you're a member of the Hyrulean royal family—the old one, of course—you'd be accepted as an honorary tribesman, just considering our alliance with them. No doubt if the princess had lived… well, we'll worry about that later." She paused, eyes darkening. Link could not tell if she was looking beyond him, into the face of the yellow-haired girl in the past, or into the future, where another child may be waiting. "It depends on the village you want to be accepted into. Each had its own rites… Kasuto would accept you if you were blessed by the spirits of its trees. But getting the larches' blessing was no easy task—you basically had to already know how to talk to them, and no one but a Kasuto elder could do that. And Ikanokana… well, they wouldn't accept any outsider who wasn't already dead." Link raised an eyebrow at her and she smiled. "I suppose the easiest way for you to become one of us is to marry into the tribe, like my mother."

"Oh." He closed his eyes, trying to escape the silence that fell over them. "Will I be tattooed, then, if that happens?"

"Yes. We tattoo every member, no matter what age they join us. Some non-members too, should they earn it."

"How do you earn it?"

"There's no one way to go about it. But you have to do something extraordinary."

"Like what?"

Impa yawned. "You're full of questions tonight, aren't you?"

Both of them knew it was a meaningless observation. He was always full of questions. But it served to mark the end of the conversation, and when he didn't answer her, she rolled back onto her side. Link scooted forward, the coldness of the night seeping past the candle and into his back.

Link watched Impa's breath slow as she fell into half-sleep. He slowly crept up to her and lay his head against her back, bunching his hands under his chin and warming them between his neck and her shoulder blade. He breathed deeply, drawing in her scent.

She smelled of Kakariko. It was a faint echo of the place, but he tried to breathe it in as deeply as he could, as he did every night, hoping that some of the images and warmth of the town could help coax him into sleep. He tried to reconstruct the sentiment the smells had instilled when he'd been deaf, taking deeper breaths, focusing solely on the faint scent of trees, swaying in the chilly Eldine winds. But he could not revive the acuity of his other senses—he could only hope to enjoy what little comfort Impa's particular smell offered him on that cold night.

He wondered if everyone smelled like the towns they grew up in. It would explain why the air around Impa's sleeping form reminded him of verdant forests and cool rivers. But that assumption left him to the horrifying conclusion that he smelled, inevitably, like the Capital. Perhaps, even when he left the smoke-choked streets and wandered the green hills of the country, he carried that scent with him.

 _Maybe that's why she sleeps with her back to me_ , he thought. _I smell like mud and factory smoke, and I always will._

He suddenly felt very cold. But he didn't press closer to Impa. He just turned on his other side and drew the covers tighter to him, staring at the dim light of the dying candle. Outside the window, the first flakes of winter fell.

* * *

Link had not read the paper in weeks. He didn't have time. He had _read_ , of course, if skimming down a list of census statuses counted as reading, but he could not help but feel as if he was falling horribly out of practice. Thousands of meaningless words passed through his mind, straight in, straight out without leaving so much as a scrap of knowledge in his tired brain.

He and Impa took turns burying themselves in the city's records hall, not only because repeating their visits daily and for hours at a time looked suspicious, but simply because it proved mind-numbingly tedious. Link appeared at home among the tomes and scrolls and the other thin-necked, silent young professional Hylian men perusing the records. He wore his collar high and looked educated, and the winter air slowly seeping through the hall's long, stained glass windows gave him an easy excuse to wear his hood and cloak inside. With his face sufficiently shadowed, with his body tucked away among the halls and bookshelves of the forgotten spaces of the city's most boring attraction, he figured he was safe from prying eyes.

That day he had gathered information on eight more men on their list. Four had been registered as married in the past two years, which was a start, but he could not rule out the other four just yet. There were so few names they could cross off with assurance—only after days, sometimes a week or more, of careful stalking, spying, eavesdropping (most of which Impa did, leaving Link to the more menial but no less important tasks of gathering initial information on the men) could they abandon a lead. The potential father of the royal baby could fall under many categories not covered in the census—married within the past two years, father to a child out of wedlock; hell, he could've switched careers recently and Link would be searching through the records of factory overseers for no reason.

If this is what the majority of Sheikah missions looked like, he wasn't sure he was truly cut out for it. Impa, so dedicated and serious, both with and without words had emphasized the dire importance of their work. She rarely if ever complained, and from his adventures with her, made it seem as if her tribe's life consisted of winter feasts, epic battles and forays into foreign lands. Only Palo had warned him about the tedium—of war, of reconnaissance—and as usual, he was right.

 _I wonder how Palo would handle this situation,_ Link thought as he copied the names, addresses, marital statuses and ages of the eight men he had found among the records. _If I were his partner I think he'd just take me to the smoke dens and wait until our target walked in by chance._ Link wasn't too fond of firegrass; it altered his senses in a way discomfiting to him, but he figured it would be just about as mind-numbing as the research he did now. He sighed, replaced the tomes and scrolls on the extensive shelves, and pushed the small set of notes he'd made up his sleeve. He would show them to Impa later, and if he was lucky, she would have some more information to add to them.

When he exited the hall, tightening his scarf, a gust of wind blew sharp flakes of snow into his face. He wrinkled his nose against the flurry and descended the stairs leading to the records hall. _Maybe Palo would simply talk to the dead_ , he theorized. _I'm sure they have more information to offer than the living._ He stopped in the street, struck by the novelty of the idea. He had no way of contacting the dead, without the aid of Palo's talent or long-lost Sheikah artifacts. But he knew even a common boy like him had some chance of glimpsing an apparition if he searched for one; everyone had some story or another of meeting a ghost without a deadseer around.

The only (possibly) dead man of any use to Link was the single occupant of that now-destroyed mansion at the end of a street across town. Perhaps it was instinct, maybe a desire to avoid the difficult, boring work of searching through public records, but he knew he was not ready to give up on Innar. Even if he was dead, maybe there was some wisp of him left behind that could give Link a good lead to follow.

Impa had said she thought Innar, or someone close to him, was still alive—she hadn't offered much proof of it, but Link believed her intuition. After all, a hunch had precipitated their meeting in the first place—her gut told her to follow him to the yellow-haired girl's window, to lead him from the palace, fish him out of the moat, and he had no doubt it had played a crucial role in keeping him alive over this past year or so. She may have little faith in her own minor clairvoyance, but he knew better.

Impa was logical—she had weighed the chances of success in her head and chose in favor of the more tedious but more reliable route. Link, however, did not have to resort to that quite yet. He still had a few hours before Impa expected him back at their dingy lair. Before he could fully contemplate his decision, he took a right turn down the boulevard, away from the slums of the outer districts. His shoes clicked against frozen cobblestone as he made his way past houses of gradually increasing size, high-quality taverns and inns.

He knew how to walk as if he belonged among the brick walls and shining glass casements, head lifted, hands in his pockets. He had walked these streets many times before, but in a much different station. Now, just for fun, he looked into the eyes of people passing him. They did not spare him a second glance—he was used to it, of course. The odd thing was that he felt no shame when he looked into the lovely faces of the wealthy women, when he examined the meticulously kempt mustaches of their husbands; he felt no embarrassment when the well-dressed children hanging between their parents arms sent a glance his way. For the time being, at least while his disguise lasted, he could count himself their equal.

No passersby bothered him or impeded his march to the remains of Innar's mansion. The district was strangely silent about the event, too, and when he tried to glean any information from passing conversations, he heard only praise of the King's victory in Obra Garud, worries about finances and compliments for newborn children, congratulations on promotions, weddings, successes. It was as if talk of the uncanny arson in the middle of their district was forbidden. Considering Innar was apparently the enemy of their King, it did not surprise Link that everyone would avoid talking about him. You never knew when the royal guard could be listening, after all.

But apparently there was one person that seemed to be interested in the whole affair. When Link rounded the final corner and the rubble at the end of the street came into view, he glimpsed a figure, cloaked in plain brown, standing over the ruins. He immediately threw himself into the shadowy edges of the street, hand moving to the small knife he kept hidden at his waist. He crept along the walls of the adjacent houses, head down, feet silent. He fixed his eyes on the unmoving figure, and imagined he was silent, dark-clad Sheim, slipping through the cracks in the walls around him, quick and unseen as air.

His active imagination led him successfully down the street, close enough to the mysterious figure to get a good look at it. It seemed female, and he wondered why a peasant girl would show sudden interest in the ruins of a Gerudo businessman.

She moved around the front of the mansion to get a closer look at it. Link saw her golden shoes, the way her delicate feet touched the cobblestone as if in perpetual tiptoe, and thought he might recognize the gait. He crept from the shadows, knife still raised, and slipped toward her, reaching out his free hand for her arm—

A large fist flew into his stomach. He stumbled backward as a brown hand gripped his neck, nearly lifting him from the ground. He sputtered and choked as the fingers tightened. Instinctively he raised his knife and swiped, blind and breathless. As the blade drew blood, the hands threw him to the cobblestone, knocking whatever air remained from his aching lungs. His head spun, his throat constricted, and somewhere beyond him, he heard his knife clatter to the ground. As his vision darkened, he could not think of anything but Impa's anger at finding him dead in the middle of the street. He saw only her disappointed face as darkness overtook him, and couldn't help his guilty smile.


	44. The Last Resort

"There is much debate over what makes a good beer, much more over what makes a good wine. But the matter of what makes a good tavern has already been settled: ask any barkeep and he'll say it's the constant patronage of miscreants, insurgents and undesirables."

"Hedge-witch" Maple, preface to _The Book of Brewing_

* * *

"Kid. Hey kid."

Link's breath returned. A large hand lifted him to his feet, gently, and held him upright as he swayed, half-conscious.

"Pull yourself together."

A sharp smack to his face brought him back to his senses. He snapped his eyes open to see a cloaked figure looming over him. He blinked against the blur, and when the wind blew the cowl from his attacker's head, he spied a familiar face, with a nub of flesh where her ear had once been.

"You should've told me it was you," she said.

He massaged his throat. "N…abru," he croaked.

She gave him an exhausted smile, squeezing the wound on her arm as the bleeding slowed. "I forgot how quick you are. Not a deep enough cut, though. You still need some work." He looked over her arm and tried to offer to help her bind it, but he couldn't quite catch his breath.

Galra trotted up to them as he coughed violently, chastising himself for focusing so intently on Galra's cloaked figure he had completely ignored the giant sneaking up on him. He added this failure to the mental list of lessons he'd learned the hard way.

The girl looked at Nabru's wound, muttering in Gerudo. The giant herself did not seem concerned with it at all, so Galra turned her attention to Link

"What are you doing here?" she spat.

Link knew he could ask the same of her, but decided to forgo the meaningless banter. "Looking for your brother," he gasped.

"Fancy that," Galra said mirthlessly. "I am, too."

Nabru glanced over her shoulder at the ashes of the building. "It seems like he's changed residences. Did you have anything to do with that?"

"No. I don't know when this happened… Impa and I looked for him, and we found this."

"What do you want with a man like Innar?" Galra asked. Her voice betrayed the worry under her mask of curiosity.

"He has information—"

"It's always about information with you lot, isn't it?" Galra turned on her heel, looked back at the ruins at the end of the street, and cupped her chin. "If he's alive… well…"

"Impa thinks he's alive," Link offered.

"What she thinks doesn't mean anything to me." She seemed to intend the statement only as fact, but her words struck him like a glancing blow. "If he's alive," she continued, "I know where he would've gone. But I've never been to this city so I'm not sure how to get there."

"I can help you," Link said.

Her colored lips pursed in thought. "I need to find the statue of Nayru."

"Which one?"

"It should be in the eastern districts."

Link tapped his chin, thinking. "I can lead you to it."

Galra looked to Nabru, then back to Link. "All right." She gathered her cloak tighter around her, and motioned for Nabru to follow. She tiptoed down the road, scowling at the falling snow—Link wondered if she'd ever had the pleasure of seeing it before. When he asked, she shook her head and muttered something in Gerudo he couldn't understand.

"Are the others with you? The deadseer and the… girl." Nabru followed Galra down the street, pulling her hood up back over her head. With each step, she slouched a little more, compressing her body to a less suspicious size. She seemed defeated, naked without her spear.

"Talm and Palo? No. They went back to Kakariko." Link looked over his shoulder at the pair, guilt rising steadily from his stomach and into his words. "How… how is Ahnadib?" he asked.

"She's been better," Galra answered. "The last time I saw her, she was behind bars. Her trial was coming up. I haven't had word of her since."

"The papers haven't said anything about her, either." Link admitted. He walked in silence for a moment, thinking of what to say. Eventually he lowered his head and sighed. "Galra, Nabru, I'm sorry."

"For what?"Galra's eyes didn't leave the ground.

"For… everything. For Obra Garud. I'm sorry we couldn't help you."

When she heaved a sigh, her breath condensed thick and white in the chilly air. "The city would've fallen eventually."

"Don't talk like that, Galra," Nabru growled.

"It's true. Barudi would've toppled our walls soon enough."

"Barudi?" Link asked, but he knew she referred to the woman he'd seen rise from the water, the one with the freezing stare.

"That snake from the Colossus," Nabru answered. "That's her name—or at least that's what they're saying."

"It's not even a real name," Galra said. "It's like Agahnim or Aveil or something. Nobody has a name like that."

"What's so strange about it?" Link asked. "Does it mean something?"

"Nothing." He tilted his head, and Galra sighed. "'Nothing' is exactly what it means."

" _Barudi-hadh_ —the deathless abyss," Nabru said, absentmindedly bunching her sleeve around her cut and stemming the blood. "It is clear she wants to be intimidating."

"And she _is_ ," Galra said. "I've seen her. She stands next to that bastard King and whispers into his ear like an evil spirit."

"She's a right traitor bitch," Nabru put in.

"Not so loud. Besides, she's a rova. The idea of treason does not apply to women like her; the lawless, the amoral."

"What's a rova?" Link asked. He remembered having heard the word once or twice in Obra Garud, but hadn't bothered to seek an explanation of it.

"An ancient witch of the Haunted Waste," Galra answered. "They lived in the Colossus, once. Up to around Ganond's time."

"A cabal of evil little snakes," Nabru grunted.

"And she's in Obra Garud with the King?" Link asked.

"Yes. She doesn't leave his side, I hear," Galra said. She abandoned the treasonous topic when they reached a busy street, too full of eyes and ears. She looked around and coughed into her hand. "I'm freezing to death. Where's the damn statue?"

"A few blocks from here," Link answered.

"Then Innar should be close by. If he's not in the grave by now." She let Link again lead the way. The wind around them howled in earnest, blowing the thin layer of snow from the city's rooftops and into the faces of red-nosed pedestrians.

"How do you Hylians handle this cold?" Nabru asked. She held her arm

"We drink a lot," Link answered. "Mulled wine and hot mead, mostly."

Nabru laughed. Link's heart lifted to see some of the regret and worry leave her features. "Perhaps we can warm me up with a mug or two."

"Where we're going, that's certainly possible," Galra said. The humble fountain of Nayru, weatherbeaten and dry, stood in the center of the square ahead of them. Snow dotted the goddess' raised arms, and part of her face had been worn smooth by years of rain and snow. Link did not know why no one bothered to repair this particular fountain—perhaps because it was in a less than desirable part of town and the aristocracy couldn't be bothered.

"Wait here," Galra said to them. "I think I see…" She left them standing at the corner, and approached a figure slouching at the edge of the fountain, throwing seeds to imaginary pigeons (the real ones had long since found someplace warmer to roost for the winter).

"So," Nabru said, crossing her arms and leaning against a glowing lamppost. "You're still trying to be a little thorn in your King's side?"

Link nodded. "There's a rumor… well…" He looked about him for any spying eyes or listening ears. The only people around were the man at the fountain, and an earnest lamplighter boy on the other side of the square, crawling up the lampposts and preparing for the rapidly falling night. "A rumor that a descendent of the old royal family was born in the city."

"Ah, planning to replace an old King with a new one," Nabru's eyes narrowed, glinting. "An old strategy. How do you know that your new monarch will be any better?"

Link shrugged. "I don't. But…" An image came to him of the golden power he'd encountered in the King's palace. "It has something to do with birthright."

"Let me tell you something, kid. Birthrights and bloodlines don't mean shit. If you're wise and strong and able, you're fit to rule. That's always been the weird thing about you Hylians—you accept your rulers because they're the inbred children of the ones you already have. Although we Gerudo weren't much better until the Conquest War. We used to pick some baby boy who looked enough like his mother to count as one of us, and make him our unquestionable overlord. It was so incredibly stupid." Her sharp eyes followed Galra as she stepped away from the man on the fountain's edge. "If you were smart, you'd replace your King with someone better than the old royal family. Hell, kid, I think you'd make a better king than any snotty nobleman."

Link blushed. Galra trotted back to them, motioning for them to follow. She walked across the square, past the earnest lamplighter (drawing an admiring gaze from him as she sauntered by, despite her half-hidden face), and into a small, dark alleyway. The cold seemed to heighten with each step, and the clouds above darkened to a malignant grey. Link wondered how long he had until Impa expected him to return to her, or if she had started worrying. But he knew he couldn't just abandon Galra and Nabru because he had a curfew.

They descended a narrow flight of stairs into a tiny courtyard. Galra stopped at a heavy wood door, windowless except for a small slit at eye level, and looked back at Link and Nabru, wearing an anxious frown. Hand shaking slightly (now devoid of any rings or jewels, Link noticed), she rapped at the door thrice.

The window slit opened and a pair of ice-blue eyes peered out. "What do you want?" came a gruff voice.

"I want to talk to you about numbers," Galra said.

"Which numbers?"

"Twenty-three and number one."

With several clacks of metal latches, the door unlocked. Slowly, it swung inward, creaking on massive hinges, and a tall Hylian man stood on the other side, bald head shining orange in the torchlight behind him.

"Welcome to the Last Resort," he growled. Galra stepped inside, followed by Nabru (who had to duck her head to fit through the tall door), and finally, Link.

The place smelled of sweat and alcohol. A dusty, thick haze of smoke obscured the patrons, the long wooden bar, and the woman who stood behind it, dark locks pulled up into a messy bun. Her eyes shone over cheeks dotted with decorative jewels, corners of her thick lips upturned in a curious smile. She cleaned a goblet, running a cloth over its already shining surface, and eyed them attentively.

Galra approached the woman behind the bar, and sat on a stool.

"New blood," the barmaid smiled.

Nabru leaned against the counter beside Galra. She lowered her hood, and Link's eyes settled on her missing ear. He had to stop himself from reaching up and touching the raised scars around it, out of mere curiosity. He wondered if she could still hear normally, but he didn't bother asking.

"I'm looking for Innar edh-Garudan," Galra said.

The woman's smile disappeared. "In the back room." Galra heaved a relieved sigh. Link saw her shoulders relax, her head droop. The woman put her elbow on the bar, balling a fist and laying her plump chin on it. "Are you his sister?"

"I am."

"You have my sympathy. Your whole family has lost much in the siege."

"Thank you." Galra pushed off the stool and walked toward the back of the bar, eyeing the patrons around her. Something soft touched Link's leg, and he glanced down to see a fat white cat, more fur than animal, rub up against his shin. He bent briefly to greet the creature, running a finger behind its big ear, marveling for a moment at its perfectly flat, perfectly hideous face. When Nabru nudged him, he released the cat and followed Galra.

The conversations around them were quiet, rushed. A few figures lingered over a map in the corner, a gathering redolent of a strategic meeting. Two old women smoked cigarettes in the corner, playing a rapid game of cards. There was something inescapably illicit about the whole pub, but perhaps that was simply because it had required a password to enter.

Near the back of the smoky bar stood a wooden door. Galra stopped before it, glancing around to make sure it she was in the right place. It seemed, besides a narrow descending staircase to her left, to be the only way onward. Almost nervously, she took the handle and pushed the door open.

A billow of foul-smelling smoke came pouring from the room beyond, white and thick. Link coughed and covered his mouth as it washed over him, almost stinging his skin. He rubbed it from his eyes, and despite his discomfort, entered the room behind Galra.

Lounging on a bug-eaten couch, enveloped fully in the haze of smoke, sat three Gerudo men. The one in the middle raised a mouthpiece to his lips, sucking smoke from a long tube and releasing it into the already saturated air, before slowly turning his head to them. He looked all three of them over for a minute, but it wasn't until Galra walked up to the table and leaned over him that he could see her clearly enough through the haze to recognize her. When he did, his veiny red eyes widened slightly, struggling to lift his heavy lids. He seemed to want to pull himself from the cushions, but couldn't drag his body up to greet her.

"Sister," he croaked, thin lips parting in a soporific smile. "You're alive."

"And you're barely so," she answered, but stepped up to the couch anyway. The other men beside him made room for her, one reaching out and pulling the mouthpiece from Innar's limp hand while he retreated.

The man drew his sister into his arms, kissing her forehead. His movements were slow, dreamlike, his hands shook and his words came out reluctantly, as if he was not sure what his own mouth was saying. "And Nabru," he said slowly, glancing up at the giant leaning in the doorway. "You've grown taller since we last met." He laughed at himself, eyes wandering to Link. "Is this your newest conquest, Galra?"

She chuckled a little, pulling herself from his embrace. "Perhaps."

"Gods, I thought you were dead," he slurred. "I was about to… I didn't know… great goddesses' tits, and everyone's riding my ass about this and that." He rubbed his eyes. "With all the warring factions here in the city, and the Knights of Hylia and even some of the Last Resort crowd… it's all too much. They burned down my house."

"Who did?" Galra asked.

"Damned if I know. The Knights—no, they wouldn't. It was the fucking royalists. I don't know which ones but they did it. They killed my cats. One by one, kept leaving their heads and paws on my doorstep." Suddenly and without warning, the gravity of the situation seemed to dawn on him, and he buried his face in his hands. "What sort of beast kills a man's cat?"

Galra glanced up at Nabru and Link. "I'm sorry about him," she said. "It seems times have been trying."

"Maybe Link should delay talking to him until after the…" Nabru sniffed the air, but couldn't seem to come up with a suitable guess, "whatever this is wears off."

Link could not help but wonder how long that would take. One of the other men on the couch had passed out completely, body draped across its arm as if he had died there. The other just stared at the wall, blowing smoke.

"Death… so much death… Our family is in shambles," Innar muttered. "Tell me, Galra. How many of my brothers have died?"

Her face fell. "Nadir, Galhid, Akhar, Harun, Ehmud and Buron."

"Half the litter, huh? At least you remembered all their names. I bet our mother didn't."

"Innar, don't."

Innar did. "Damn, maybe you even remember their faces. No one else will." His eyes seemed to settle on Link, perhaps because he appeared to be the most attentive one in the room besides his rapidly reddening sister. "Listen, kid. Every parent's got a favorite. The ones that tell you otherwise are liars. Hell, it was so obvious—"

"Perhaps you should sleep," Galra told him. "You'll feel better then."

"I _can't_ sleep," he hissed. "Why do you think I'm in Telma's back room smoking this _shit!"_ He furiously indicated the large argileh standing upright on the table next to the couch. "Gods damn, I don't even know what they put in it. It isn't working."

Galra looked helplessly again at Link and Nabru. The giant just rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. "Just interrogate him now, if you must," she pushed Link forward, and he stumbled toward the couch.

"Uh, I…" he started. Innar's heavy head bobbed atop his neck precariously, eyes glazed. Even in his debilitated state, he seemed impatient with Link's stuttering.

"Out with it," he mumbled.

"You ran a wormsilk plant here, right?" Link asked.

"I did. Until… well…"

"You knew other men who ran factories, didn't you?"

"Sure. I knew lots of 'em. We all drank the same ale, bought the same whores. Shared pictographs of kids. The whole shit show."

"We're looking for one who had a child last year. Probably mid-autumn."

"Kid… Someone with a kid… boy or girl?"

"I don't know."

"Well, shit. Neither do I. Get me paper, someone get me paper, I'll scribble some names if I remember them." He snapped his fingers at the man beside him but he was too far gone to be of any use. Innar's head drooped onto his shoulder, and Link offered him the back of the parchment on which he had written the marital statuses of their targets earlier that day. Innar took the parchment shakily. He could barely hold the pen when Link handed it to him.

He seemed to stare at the paper for a moment, deep in thought, and started writing.

"In _Hylian_ , Innar," Galra reminded him.

"Oh, yes. Of course." He scribbled something, and Link had to lean over the parchment to make sure he was writing names instead of utter nonsense. Innar mumbled to himself as he scribbled in script nearly as illegible as Talporom's, "Well, Maggie had a child—oh, you're looking for men, right?"

Link nodded.

"Chudley had one a while back, a boy, I think. Um… Stockwell too. No, his was a girl." Innar bit his lip, fingers trembling. "Malo had twins, I remember… I think Beedle… no, as if anyone would ever let him stick 'em with that shriveled prick." He paused to laugh joylessly. "I can't remember. This is all. There are four? No. Five. Here." He nearly threw the paper at Link and fell against the back of the couch. He expelled a groan, rubbing his eyes.

Nabru sighed as Link retreated with the information. Her eyes darted from Galra's agitated face to Innar's near-incomprehensible one. "Molgera's tail, take a long gander at this pathetic mess," she muttered. "Galra, you'll have to take care of him. At least until Ahnadib gets here."

"Wait, _what?"_ he nearly gasped, pulling himself upright only to sink back into the cushions. "Who?"

"Ahnadib," Nabru said. "Your mother."

"Nabru…" he whispered. His eyebrows wrinkled in the smoky room, casting thick shadows across his face. "You don't know, you haven't heard the news. Shit, word travels so much faster here than it does aboveground." He shook his head, eyes shut tight.

Galra reached out and clutched his elbow. Link saw her tense up, saw her mouth pull taut, preparing for the inevitable.

"Galra," Innar started, lips trembling. "Our mother is dead. They executed her yesterday morning."

* * *

Screams. It was always the goddamned screams that woke him up the moment he finally drifted off. He could close his ears to the scraping, the whispering, the death rattles and quiet weeping, but the full-bellied wail of a rebellious last breath never failed to snap him out of his tranquility. And this particular scream was so close and so deep that after it had shaken him awake, he knew he had no chance of falling back asleep.

Palo sat up. He gazed through the small window in his hut, gauging the progression of the moonlight across the marks in his floor. It had to be halfway to morning at this point, and some restless bastard decided now of all times to squeal his last. Palo rolled out of his wolfskin blankets and crouched over the small chest next to his pillow. He removed his pipe and a small leather pouch, stretched, and stepped outside.

The winter air hovered perfectly still, perfectly freezing. He slept fully clothed in winter, but no matter how much he piled on, he could never completely escape the chill that seeped through the walls and blankets into his skin. The winter festival hadn't yet arrived and already the season was unbearable. Hands shivering, he reached into his leather pouch and pulled out a match.

Another aimless moan billowed through the air, and he lifted his eyes to the graveyard, buried in snow and lit silver by the passing moon. In the clear air he saw a quivering light, rotund and hovering slowly from one end of the graveyard to the other. He closed his eyes and could make it out better—the open mouth, the wide, black eyes, the length of intestine dangling to its knees as it limped on shaking, thin legs. Like the others of its kind, it had a hunched, rocky back, holes for ears and long arms, terminating in large, hard-knuckled hands. These hands cupped a round stomach, as if they could possibly keep inside what came spilling out with each step.

Palo didn't see too many Gorons around Kakariko. But when they came, goddesses above, they made a show of it. Sometimes they wandered in from Death Mountain, lost, unable to get back into the city beneath it, sometimes they rose from battlefields long abandoned, sometimes they came from the wilderness as if returning from a long journey. This particular specimen, probably a youth by the looks of him, had most definitely met his end in one fight or another during the Eldin War. He wore the mark of a warrior studying under the patriarch Durmia, and the cut across his middle was clean, likely left by one of Elgra's knights. His large hands covered the gash as he trailed around the graveyard, moaning, bellowing in panic as only a Goron could. He did not seem to notice Palo watching him, so the Sheikah just reached back into his leather bag for some firegrass to fill his pipe. Sometimes, if he managed to smoke enough, he could rest despite the groaning of the sleepless dead.

His fingers came up empty. He opened the bag a little wider and reached farther inside, scraping his nails along the bottom for any stray lumps or leaves. When he found none, he cursed himself for letting his supply run dry. He bit his lip—there was none to be harvested this deep in the winter, so he'd have to make the trek all the way down to Old Riko to get Temon to sell him a jar or two. As far as Palo could remember, he still owed the man quite a bit for the horses they'd taken to the desert, and had no desire to indebt himself further. But gods above, he might not sleep all winter if this kept up…

He raised his eyes to the hills, and saw a tiny glare of light, an orange half-circle glowing against the shadows of Eldin. He narrowed his eyes, ignoring the Goron's incessant wailing, and pocketed his pipe. He stepped away from the graveyard, through the crunching snow, and wound his way up the mountain path toward that firelight, the welcoming, warm invitation to the elder's elevated cave.

When he arrived at the mouth of her abode, he saw her hunched over her roaring fire, staring into the flames with eyes half closed. It seemed an unusual time for her to be out and about—then again, she was unlike many other old people who seemed to collapse at dusk and rise again shortly before dawn.

"Hello, Palo," she said. She did not remove her eyes from the fire.

"Hello, Elder Merel," he answered. He sat next to her when she patted a small cushion beside her, as if she had been expecting him. Perhaps she had foreseen his waking, perhaps she had felt through some magic his constant shivering, and lit a fire for him to follow. He never really knew.

"Did a death disturb you?" she asked.

He crossed his legs and warmed his hands against the merciful flames. "Yeah."

"Not a Sheikah death?"

Though Sheikah often met violent ends, they were usually somewhat quiet about it—he could sleep through those ones. "Goron. One of Durmia's sworn brothers, by the markings on him." Palo took a second to rub his numb feet. "What are you doing up at this hour, Elder?"

"Asking myself questions," she answered.

"Which questions?"

The elder lowered her eyes to the two pieces of scrap metal lying next to the fire.

"That junk?" Palo asked. It seemed an odd subject to occupy the elder's time, especially at so ungodly an hour. He would've thought she'd be ruminating on more important issues than that.

"And the fate of the Gerudo Desert." She took a moment to blink, slowly. She looked as if she could fall asleep any minute, drawing an inappropriate look of envy from him. "A letter came from Sheim. He arrived in Silk a few days ago, where he met Talporom and Elpi in good health. But they have few allies and many enemies in that city. And without the Gerudo, we Sheikah don't have a lot of friends left." She sighed. "I'm thinking of summoning Talporom back. It has been years since he's set eyes on his own village and having him so far away worries me."

"Worries you?"

"The fire tells me that sooner than we'd hope we will need a competent medic around here."

A flicker of worry sparked and died out in Palo's stomach. "You don't qualify as competent?"

"These hands are old, and wont to shaking." She fell silent for a moment. She raised her palms to the fire, but he could tell it was not to warm them in the flames—she was feeling out a picture in the heat. "No… it is best if I teach him the rest of what I know before I leave this world. I'm not long for it, Palo. Surely a deadseer can tell that."

An acute pain gripped his chest. "You of all people know that's not how it works."

"You are more sensitive than you think," she answered. "In every respect." She lowered her hands, scooting up on her small, shaking legs. Palo helped her from the fire and she hobbled over to one corner of her abode, where she reached into the nooks of the stone and pulled out a small wooden box. "I saw you coming," she said, leading him slowly and unsteadily back to the fire.

"In the flames?"

"Up the path. I'm not supposed to admit this but the whole reason elders ever know what's going on is that we have a good view." When she sat back down on her little pillow by the fire, she opened the box. To Palo's delight, he saw a small pile of dried firegrass inside. "It is easy to guess why you are so restless, Palo. Hand me your pipe."

He shook his head, not bothering to hide his smile, as he reached for his bag at his waist. "You do know everything, don't you?"

"Of course not. But I'm quite good at pretending I do." With gnarled fingers, she pinched a few leaves from her stash and stuffed the bowl of his pipe.

"Will you smoke with me, Elder?" he asked.

"Why not? It's been years, and it can't kill me before old age does."

Palo smiled and raised a match to the fire, retreating to light the contents of the bowl. With a single breath he felt infinitely calmer. He leaned back, exhaling through his nose, and he passed the sweet-smelling pipe and the still-lit match to the elder. She took an impressive, indulgent puff.

"A letter came from Impa today," she said.

Palo's heart quickened. "And?"

They're both in good health and under little suspicion as of yet."

"No luck with their mission, though?"

"It does not seem so. But I have faith they will succeed."

He bit his lip for a moment, then carefully raised the pipe again to his lips. "If nothing bad happens."

The elder closed her eyes. "If nothing bad happens, spirits willing." She opened her lids and gave Palo a narrow glance. "What makes you think something will happen? Impa is determined to not fail again. Do you not trust her?"

"I trust her. It's that little scrawny stableboy we left with her that I don't trust."

"You seem to like him well enough."

"Oh, I _do_ like him. He's affectionate, naive, soft around the edges. He's like a wide-eyed puppy, and I trust him as much as I'd trust one of those."

"Remember, Palo," the elder said, tone darkening. "It was not him who failed last time."

A shiver coursed up his spine, and he retreated behind a wall of smoke. "Maybe it _was_. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe he'll lead Impa into the castle moat again, and this time she won't come back."

The elder eyed him for a long time. He counted the lumps in his throat he swallowed, dangling helpless at the end of her wizened gaze. "She will come back to you, Palo," Merel whispered, finally. "You worry he will lead her away from you, to a place you do not want to go." He looked into the fire, away from her stare, throat constricting. Even the firegrass could not slow the beat of his heart as the elder started to peel him apart. "You worry he will promise her something you cannot, and she will not come back to you. But she knows better. She loves you, Palo. Dearly. At least as much as you love her, and in the same way." The elder plucked the pipe from Palo's hands with a kind, hoarse laugh. "You get this way every time she expresses the least bit of interest in others."

He released a pained chuckle and raised a hand to his forehead, still unwilling to meet her stare. "Is it that obvious?"

"No. Not at all, and that's the trouble. You keep silent and blank and find yourself disappointed when others don't understand what you're not saying. You're what Impa's grandmother used to call a bottler. You cork everything inside and let it ferment."

"But that's what makes a good wine," Palo smiled.

"Yes, well, that's where Renepa's metaphor falls apart. Many of them did. Regardless, you should open that bottle more often." The elder paused for a moment, smile fading. "Do you fear dying alone, Palo?"

The question hit him like a blow, but he tried his best to parry. "We all die alone. There's no point in deceiving myself into believing otherwise."

"Then what is it you fear?"

He fell silent. He stared into the fire for a while, thinking of corks and bottles. The elder watched him, her stare intense but not unkind, and he sighed. "Running out of time. There's only so much we can share between us before we die, you know."

"Of course I know. I'm approaching four score years—I can tell as well as anyone how little time we have."

"Others know how to spend their time." He took a deep, shaky breath, but he could not tell if it was only because of the smoke, or the bubbling discomfort at the pit of his stomach. "I'm afraid, Elder, that everyone else knows something I don't."

"But that is understandable. That is a feeling many people share."

"I… feel like there's a part of me…" He stopped, choosing to frown instead of speak.

"You're going to say 'missing.'" He stayed silent for a long moment, eyes fixed on the fire. "Many years ago, Sheim once came to me for advice. He worried he was a burden, a detriment to the tribe because his proclivities were not conducive to producing children. He thought by remaining childless he was failing his clan, contributing to the dying out of our people. He regretted he'd never experience something as innate as fatherhood. That was only a few years before he found Elpi. He hasn't complained since."

"I can't imagine Sheim needing advice from anyone," Palo admitted.

"He was once a young man, too. He, like all of us, has his own troubles. He's just good at hiding them. Much better than you." She took another puff and exhaled into her fire. "That was a decade or so before I even became Elder. I suppose people have been coming to me with their problems for years."

"You _are_ a healer," Palo said.

"Now, for the real question: was I born a healer, or did I become one from lending a helping hand to too many people for too long?" She rested a palm on his shoulder. "Feel free to sleep here, I know how the dead can keep you up. But a good fire can lull even the most restless to sleep."

"It _is_ a good fire," Palo said. He stretched himself out in its warmth and folded his hands under his cheek.

She shakily removed her cloak and rested it over him. "Palo… you are what you are. There's no use regretting what you're not."

"I think you stole that line from me."

"And you stole it from Sheim, who stole it from me that day he came to me for advice." She smoothed her cloak out over him and patted it. "You do not need me to tell you anything. You already know what you know. But you have a mind that likes to doubt when it is restless. So here, let it rest. Feel the heat of the flames."

Palo yawned and closed his eyes. "Elder… thanks for the firegrass."

"It's what I'm here for. Now go to sleep."

* * *

"I thought you might've met with trouble," Impa said."I was about to come looking for you." She sat on their table, arms crossed, wearing an angry look. Link just trudged over to their mattress and collapsed on it. Impa stood and hovered over him, watching his eyes intently. "What happened?" she asked. The anger that hoarsened her voice only seconds earlier disappeared when she got a full view of the expression on his face.

"Ahnadib's dead," Link answered. He still saw Galra's pretty eyes widening for a moment, before she put a hand over them and let out an unrestrained sob. He still heard her harsh cry—the same sort of cry he'd heard when he had first followed the King into the ruined market of Onrago, when the smell of fire and blood enveloped the city.

"That's regrettable," Impa said. She sat next to Link and lay a hand on the small of his back. He barely felt it over the memory of fading vibrations of a fist on wood as Nabru punched the bar's wooden wall in fury. "But it is not surprising."

He glanced at her stern face. Impa had not seen Galra hear the news. She hadn't seen the girl collapse in her brother's arms and weep. It was not Ahnadib Link's heart hurt for.

"Where did you read it?" Impa asked. "It may not be true, depending on the paper."

"Innar told me."

Impa narrowed her eyes. "Innar? You found him?"

Link nodded. "I… bumped into Galra. She'd fled Obra Garud. Her mother's wishes." Link slowly opened the small piece of paper in his palm. "We found her brother and he gave me this." Impa pulled the paper from his fingers. "These are men he knows who've had kids recently. Or… the ones he could remember."

Impa folded the paper and pocketed it. "Where did you find him?"

"A bar. More like a smoke den."

"Ah." Impa lowered her eyes. "Perhaps if you'd come to the city with Palo, you would've found him sooner."

Link smiled at that. "I was thinking about that. Maybe we should distract ourselves with… like you say, 'frivolities.'"

Impa rested a hand on the back of his head and mussed his hair. "Perhaps. You did an excellent job. Better than I've been doing." He raised his eyes to her, red from the harsh smoke of Telma's bar, and leaned his head against her shoulder. She moved her hand to the back of his neck and held it there for a while, just letting him rest against her. "You're tired. Get some sleep. In the morning, we will pay a few new fathers a visit."

He didn't know if it was the sheer volume of foul smoke he'd inhaled in the back room of the Last Resort, but something heavy seemed to drag him toward the mattress, adding sudden weight to his eyelids. "Impa," he muttered, and she was beside him, holding his arm as he lowered himself shakily onto the pillow. "I think I'm…"

She smiled. "Sometimes it happens when you're in a small room with too much smoke." She pulled the blanket over him. "Don't worry, you'll probably just sleep heavily. You may have strange dreams, though."

"I don't dream," he yawned.

"You don't?"

"Not since… Eldin." He closed his eyes.

"That's odd." Impa's voice hovered over him like a distant shout. "Or maybe it isn't."

Link didn't know anymore. Too much had happened to him since his fortuitous escape from the Capital more than a year ago. He could hardly count anything as odd. He'd seen the wolf-spirits of Mount Eldin, he'd seen the great fountain of Riverton and the statues of the Silk Bridge, he'd seen Molgera rise from the desert sands and an ancient witch emerge from a temple oasis. He'd seen the King of Hyrule kill a child with one hand, he'd seen Obra Garud fall and a grown woman sob like a child in the arms of her incapacitated brother.

He had seen many things, many exciting, saddening, terrifying and bewildering things, but now they all blurred in his head, twisting into a malformed vision of sound and color. The only thing he could do was close his eyes against it and let it flow over him, harmless and transient.

He felt the blanket tighten around his shoulders, and Impa's voice floated far above him: "Here, let me keep out the cold."

She lay down beside him and wrapped her arms around him, letting him rest his head against her shoulder. As he pressed close to her, bathing in her comforting scent, he choked back a surge of emotion, and wished fervently with all his selfish heart that it would only get colder.

* * *

Ah, before I forget, a quick note on the quotes to answer a question in the reviews: no, they're not from literature, nor are they from Hyrule Historia. They're totally made up.


	45. A Doctor's Work is Never Done

"Make no mistake, medicine in the Capital is a class issue. While the poor line up for blocks in the snow to save a dying baby, the rich can expect a physician at their door as soon as the sound of a sneeze makes its way down the boulevard. House calls are an expected service. Necessary or not, the government takes very good care of its upper-class citizens. The poor go to the doctor, the rich have the doctor come to them."

Dr. F Bandam, _Science and Medicine in Urban Settings_

* * *

"Remember your training," Impa told him. She looked a little absurd with such a serious face stuffed into a large wool scarf (Link, of course, looked equally ridiculous in his professional garb with Talporom's silly green cap pulled down to his brows).

"Of course," he said. "I went to school in Eldin. I had a strict schoolmistress."

Impa smiled. The stinging, snowy wind nearly blew her hat off her head, and she raised a hand to hold it in place. "It's already a harsh winter," she said. "No wonder there's a plethora of plagues ailing the Capital's children."

She led him down the cobblestone streets, where carriages and pedestrians stomped the new snow into a brown mess, where beggars crawled the corners asking not for food but for shelter from the stinging wind. Impa pulled out the address of the first name Innar had given them and looked it over before leading Link down a densely populated residential street. She made her way up to a large door, checking its hinges and handle before grasping the brass knocker in a gloved hand.

An elderly man in a silk waistcoat answered. When the door swung open, merciful heat rolled out after it, and Link could see a well-stoked fire glowing behind him.

"What do you want?" he asked. His eyes were dark and mean, his scowl so well-etched into his face Link figured it might as well be permanent.

"I'm a physician of the King's employ," she said, flashing him the thin sheet of paper she'd had forged in the back room at Oldcastle. The butler took it, but he seemed unimpressed with the glinting royal seal that ensured her legitimacy. "This is my student."

"From the Order? I haven't seen one of you lot pass by in a while. What do you want?"

"I understand the master of the house has had a child within the last year."

"And?"

"And we've reports of a particularly deadly illness making its way through the neighborhood. It affects infants and the elderly, for the most part. The Crown has sent available medics to conduct a survey of the health of at-risk citizenry and offer examinations if needed."

The butler looked over her credentials once more and sneered. "The master has his own private physician. He'll contact him on his own time." The butler shoved the papers back into Impa's hands and made to shut the door, but the doctor's black shoe stopped it at the frame.

"That is fine, but we do need to know the general state of health of the house's inhabitants."

"You expect me to divulge those details?"

"Yes," Impa answered. "You don't turn away the tax collector; you don't turn away the King's medics."

The butler rolled his eyes. "Fine. We're all in good health, except the child has been coughing up one hell of a storm. Though the master insists he's fine." He glanced behind him, hesitating, before quietly adding, "If you come back in the early morning, the mistress will be asleep and you can examine him then—maybe fix him before he gives us all consumption. But you didn't hear this from me."

With that, the doorman slammed the oak plank in their faces.

"Half a success," Impa muttered.

Their next endeavor wasn't even that. Impa spent nearly ten minutes knocking relentlessly at the door of a stately mansion, but no one answered. She wrote a little note on the scrap of paper and returned it to her sleeve, cursing before leading Link away from the house and back to the snowy streets.

The third potential child was located nearby. He was a fat, redheaded boy, very obviously half Gerudo, healthy in every way. The corpulent nursemaid who carried him in her strong arms was more than eager to show him off to the King's kindly physicians, and cooed at him as Impa lifted him from his swaddling clothes and looked him over.

"Isn't he wonderful?" the woman said. "And healthy, too!"

Impa held the child at a distance. She may have meant for it to look like she just wanted to get a full view of his little body, but her motions struck Link as those of a person handling something repulsive. "No coughing, nasal discharge, sleeping problems?"

"All babies have sleeping problems," the woman said. "I've been a governess and nursemaid for twenty years; it's common knowledge."

"And how are _you_ feeling?"

"Right as rain, doc."

"And how are the other residents of the house?"

"All fine."

"Good."

Impa squeezed the child's mouth open and looked inside—he let out a startled cry and wiggled desperately. Link wanted nothing more than to rescue the poor boy from Impa's probing hands, but she quickly returned the crying infant to its caretaker.

"If the situation requires it, we may visit you again next week. Is that acceptable?" Impa stood, retrieving her coat from the rack nearby and rewrapping herself.

"Yes, of course," said the maid.

"It is best if you keep the results of the visit confidential. We don't want the neighborhood worrying about plague. Although it seems this household is healthy as ever."

"We'll keep an eye out for any coughs or sneezes." The woman swaddled the baby and shushed him. He quieted in her arms like a miracle. "Let's pray this winter turns out to be a calm one."

"Indeed." Impa donned her hat, bid farewell to the woman and led Link out to the street. When they had walked a few paces from the oak door of the house, she stopped and looked to the grey sky. "Well?" she said. Link gave her a curious look. "What do you think? About the baby?"

He lifted Talporom's hat away from his ear and scratched it. "Well… it's hard to tell." He racked his mind trying to recognize any of the yellow-haired girl's features in his memory of that pudgy Gerudo face.

"All babies look the same, that's the problem," Impa sighed. She put her hands in her pockets and took a few long strides across the busy street. "They've all got those frog-like faces."

Link lowered his head, not quite willing to confess he found babies' fat cheeks and upturned noses remarkably endearing. Although he hadn't come across too many infants in his time as a stableboy, he always enjoyed their company, despite their occasional foul smells.

"Impa," he started after a few minutes. He kept his voice quiet, low, so no passersby could pick up on his words. "What would you do if the royal child turned out to be a Gerudo, like the King?"

"The same thing I'd do if they were Hylian. Gerudo or not, they have a right to the throne."

Link bit his lip, thinking. "Nabru says—" he hesitated, but Impa's look drove him forward—"she says if we were smart we'd choose our leader. She doesn't know why we only replace one monarch with another."

"She has a point," Impa admitted. "I used to ask the same question—of course, I grew up in a tribe whose ties to the old royal family go back centuries. They have been my people's closest friends and allies for hundreds of years. But I never knew why they got to rule as opposed to, say, deferring to seniority, as Sheikah do. However—" she took a few steps in silence when a man passed a little too close by. "Do you remember the room of gold you came across in the King's palace?"

"Yes."

" _That_ is what gets to decide who rules this country. Not age, not violence, not conquest or force. That power is what chooses the wisest among us. Would you oppose having your ruler chosen by virtue of his or her wisdom?"

"I guess not." He supposed it was one of the more important facets of an effective leader. He would also suggest compassion and constancy, humor and perhaps a love of animals, but he had to admit wisdom probably won out. He just found it hard to believe that wisdom was a birthright, rather than a quality earned over a lifetime.

"So, is Hyrule's true ruler born wise?" he asked Impa.

She stopped to let a carriage roll by, backing away from the wet splashes of its wheels. "That's a question for the gods, not me."

When they discovered, to their dismay, that the child of the next man on their list had died a few weeks earlier (the servant who had answered the door seemed as distraught about it as anyone), Impa crossed a name off their list. She sighed, breath billowing heavy and white from her brown lips. "One more left." She looked down at the paper. "Shaddon Stockwell. Let's hope we find something, or we might have to return to the records hall."

The next item on their list was clear across town—but it seemed they had enough time left in the evening to get there before suppertime (Link had heard the rich always ate late, for some reason). "Impa," he started, when they entered a familiar district. A few blocks to the east, the neglected fountain of Nayru stood, gathering snow. "Nabru and Galra are just around the corner. We should check up on them."

Impa heaved a dispirited sigh. "I'm sure they do not wish to see me."

"Because you told Ahnadib to surrender?" Link guessed. She nodded curtly, unwilling to slow her relentless march toward her next task. Link fell into step behind her, looking out for the alley leading to the Last Resort. "At least let me go see them."

"We mustn't distract ourselves," Impa replied.

Link stopped, planting his feet in the snow. "They're not a distraction, Impa," he said. "They're friends." He tried to hold back the sharpness in his voice, but it came out cold and biting as the wind.

Her face softened, just a little. "Fine," she said. "But we can't stay too long."

Link maintained his stubborn frown, but thanked her fervently in his head. She crept close behind him as he followed the familiar alley to a set of narrow stairs. He jumped down them, catching himself when he slipped on a patch of ice, and strode to the thick door. He rapped three times, as he remembered Galra had done.

As expected, the window slit pulled open and a pair of narrow blue eyes peered out. "What do you want?"

"I want to talk to you about numbers," Link answered.

"Numbers are old news," the voice answered, and the window slid shut. Link stared at it for a few seconds. He glanced over at Impa, who stood with her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, before knocking again.

Violently, the slit opened. "Go away."

"I'm here to see Galra. I was just here yesterday."

"Old. News."

Link grimaced. He hadn't counted on the password changing. He wondered if he had to go back to Nayru's fountain and ask the strange man with the black cloak for a hint. He almost turned to go, when he heard a shuffle and a complaint behind the still-open slit. The doorman grunted, cursing, as a muffled female voice emerged from inside the pub.

"Let him in, for all the goddesses' sakes."

The door swung open, and Nabru leaned out into the courtyard, one arm on the handle and the other holding back the large doorman. She seemed paler than usual, her hair hung loose around her shoulders, and a few stray strands fell across the dark rings under her eyes. "Come in," she said. She glanced at Impa, and Link saw a flicker of regret cross her features. "Her too."

Link stepped inside, apologizing to the doorman, as Nabru led them to the bar (nudging Telma's eager white cat out of the way), where she resumed sipping from a steaming goblet. "You're right about the mulled wine," she said to Link. "This warms me up from the bones out."

"Glad to hear," he said. He sat down beside her, Impa following suit.

"A new Sheikah face," Telma had emerged from the shadows suddenly, oracular smile shining in the smoky light. "I haven't seen you around here before. You a friend of Sheim's?"

Impa blinked. "Yes, actually."

"Well, your kind is always welcome here, you know. What'll it be?"

"Get 'em the same as me," Nabru said. "And some food for all of us." Telma nodded and disappeared into the mysterious doorway behind the bar, black curtains swishing.

"How is Galra?" Link asked.

"Not well. She's asleep now, but she spent all night torturing herself about her mother." Telma returned with some hot drinks and set them down before Link and Impa, accepting coins from Nabru's outstretched hand before either of them could insist on paying. "She's a sensitive woman. One of us has to be."

"So what will you do now?" Impa asked. Her tone was kind, curious.

"I don't know. I think the three of us will leave the Capital and go somewhere safe. Innar insists his enemies are everywhere in the city."

"Enemies?"

"Royalists and the like. He is, after all, the son of an infamous traitor." Nabru sighed. "He's got friends here in the Last Resort—so did his mother—but he says he can't count the people who want to see him dead. We might go to Silk, or maybe Onrago. Innar and Galra should reunite with their brothers. Then we can talk about taking back our homeland."

"So when do you plan to leave?" Impa asked.

"Sometime soon."

When Telma reemerged from the shadowy back room with a plate of spicy meat, Link's stomach surprised him with the intensity of its grumbling. He groped for the meat like a starving dog, and even Impa seemed eager to stuff her face before she had to go back out into the cold.

"If you'll excuse my frankness, how exactly do you plan on retaking your homeland?" she asked, mouth full.

Nabru's eyes narrowed. They were dull with grief, but Link could see the hidden spark of something akin to mischief stir in the deep black of her pupils. "It is not a bad question, Sheikah. It will be a hard road. There are so few of us soldiers left after the siege of Obra Garud. But we are here and there, loyal to our mother country. Many of us fled to the wilderness. More are lurking underneath the desert cities, much like you Sheikah lurk here in the Hyrulean Capital. We will find a way."

Impa chewed thoughtfully for a moment. "Nabru, I know you probably have very little respect for my opinion, after I suggested Obra Garud surrender." She paused, perhaps hopefully, but Nabru did not correct her. "But why not stay here, with us? Why not strike at the heart of the King when he returns home? He will not expect the lauded heroine of Obra Garud to spring from under his own nose."

"A pleasing strategy," Nabru admitted. "But my first priority is keeping Ahnadib's children safe." She finished her mug. "And she gave me some very particular instructions before we parted. It is necessary I return home."

"I understand," Impa said. She took her last bite and slipped off the stool, pulling on her coat. As she did, Telma leaned across the bar, cloth in one hand and an already-clean glass in the other.

"If you want to come again, the password's changed."

"What is it?"

"A secret to everybody."

"What?"

"I said, 'It's a secret to everybody.'"

"Gods above," Impa muttered, unamused.

"Give my regards to Sheim, honey," Telma said with a wink.

As Impa headed toward the doorway, Nabru turned on her stool. "Sheikah." Impa stopped, pulling her hat over her short hair and eyeing her from under its brim. "If you don't see me again, know this: despite both our failures, despite how it seems, I know we fight different battles in the same war. I'm sure Galra will come to understand that too, in time." She looked at Link, then back at Impa. "I wish you luck."

"And I wish you the same," Impa replied, before slipping past the indignant doorman and out into the rapidly darkening day.

After a few blocks of silence, she shook her head and sighed in relief. "I'm glad Nabru has forgiven us at least halfway. I was afraid she might've crushed my head. And… well, I was also afraid that I would let her."

"You regret your advice to Ahnadib?" Link asked.

"Yes and no. I know it was the wisest course of action. My father would've given her the same counsel. But perhaps I assumed too much when I thought she'd be granted at least a little clemency for bending the knee to the King." She rounded a corner, pausing to let a pair of lovers, arm-in-arm, walk by. "It seems he does not forgive easily."

"He doesn't," Link said. He thought of the King's dark hand around the little Gerudo assassin's neck, the apologetic look on his face as he killed her, the mercy he'd shown Link when he could've done otherwise. "Maybe he just knows what is necessary," he muttered. Impa didn't seem to hear him, and he was eager to move on. "How far is it to the next house? It's getting dark."

"Perhaps we shouldn't have distracted ourselves," Impa said. A rare playfulness colored her inflection, and a little bit of that relentless weight seemed to shrug off her shoulders with each step. He trotted closer to her, bumping his arm against hers. She bumped him back, smiling, before resuming her serious stride.

She led him past the boulevards and orange-lit taverns, past royal guards and wandering aristocrats. Link saw a few branded palace servants stroll by (of course, he couldn't see their marks under their layers of scarves, but the way they carried themselves, the way they avoided looking into the eyes of passersby was revealing enough). They walked through neighborhoods of increasing wealth, and soon found themselves close by the street the yellow-haired girl had once lived on. Link almost had to stop himself from falling into a familiar route to her window. It did not seem too long ago, now that he thought about it. He wondered if anyone had moved into her father's empty house, if anyone had cleaned up the broken glass and blood in the salon, if they had revived the lilies that grew in the girl's bedroom.

"It makes sense they would live somewhere near Nohansen," Impa muttered. "If Stockwell's wife bore his child." She lifted her chin to a lovely house at the end of a quiet street and strode toward it, past similar houses with similar fences, similar fountains and snow-covered vines crawling up their walls. Time seemed to protract as Link followed her up the steps to the house—he could see every light in the stained-glass window beside the door as Impa grasped the lion's-head knocker and pounded.

They waited for what seemed like an eternity, before a thin man, tall and bespectacled, opened the door. He wore a distinguished frown that seemed to stretch from one end of his poorly-shaven jaw to the other. "Who are you?" he said, narrowing his eyes behind elliptical lenses. "If you want money, beg somewhere else."

"Nothing of the sort, sir," Impa said. She whipped out her credentials. "You're Mister Shaddon Stockwell, are you not?"

"Shaddon is fine—Stockwell was my father." He looked the papers over carefully. "And you're… Doctor Borville?"

"Yes. I am a physician employed under the Crown. This is the first-year student assigned to accompany me." She took back her papers and tucked them away in her breast pocket. "Because of the recent threat of a plague in the vicinity of the neighborhood, I've been dispatched to provide free examinations to nearby households."

"Really." He seemed unimpressed. "What sort of plague?"

"Its symptoms are common, but it's taken a few lives. Mostly the elderly and young children. That's why we've chosen to visit you first—well, you and others with infants."

"We're all fine here," he said.

"That's very good to hear," Impa answered, "but you should certainly send the Royal Order of Medics a letter if you notice any symptoms."

"What symptoms?"

"Occasional cough or sneeze, slightly raised temperature, mild sleeping problems, pain in the face or hands. For infants, it can be hard to tell, since they can't enunciate their ills." Impa paused to take in the concerned look behind his shining spectacles. "Is your child displaying any of those symptoms?"

"Well—" the man started, and opened the door a little wider. His frown was now more curious than hostile. "She's been having a few coughs lately. I don't know if it warrants an examination, but maybe if you let your superiors know…"

"Of course. And how are you feeling?" Impa whipped out a small book on which she furiously pretended to take notes.

"Well, I've been all right—"

"Who is that?" A woman's voice, soft and musical, floated from the warm doorway. Before the man could answer, a pale face appeared behind his shoulder, framed in shining dark hair.

"They're doctors, love."

"Oh. What are they doing out in the cold at this hour?" She leaned against the man, taking his arm in hers and squeezing affectionately.

He ignored her question. "Will this examination be free of charge?" Link knew their entrance would be granted depending on the answer.

"Of course. This is a service provided by the royal government, for the health of the people," Impa said.

"Well," the man stepped away from the door and ushered them in. "The King has always been a kind man. A logical man—one that knows how to treat his subjects. Unlike a few of his predecessors—oh dear, I suppose I shouldn't say things like that, should I?"

The woman let go of his arm and swept through the foyer, to a decorated doorway to their left. A fireplace burned nearby, and the scents of perfumes and spices lingered in the air. Link took a moment to examine the hall, the high, sturdy roof beams, the intricate furniture, Shaddon standing at its center, muffler tied perhaps too tightly around his throat, especially for a man relaxing in his own home.

"This is my wife Gwen," he said, motioning to the woman and waiting for Impa and Link to conduct the usual pleasantries. "Dear, fetch our daughter. These gentlemen are here to provide a free checkup for her—for all of us, really. Apparently there's a plague."

Her face paled a little. "I haven't heard of any—"

"Bring the baby, love." He kissed her, forcibly, on the forehead, and she retreated into the opposite room as if she'd just lost a fight.

"So, you say you're feeling fine?" Impa asked, without missing a beat. Again, she had her notebook out. "How about your wife?"

"She seems fine, too… considering her weakness. She's sickly, you know, always has been. Which is why I think you should probably look at her too, while you're already here. Just in case there really is something to worry about."

Gwen returned to the room, smelling of perfume and carrying a laced bundle in her arms. "She's asleep. Please… please be gentle."

Impa nodded to Link. Gwen handed over her baby reluctantly to him—understandably, she did not want strangers handling her child, but the will of her husband and his acknowledgement of Doctor Borville's legitimacy forced her hand. She folded her palms across her chest as Link carefully lowered her infant to a small love seat near the door and started to unwrap her.

Impa approached the woman, asking her how she slept, how she ate, if she had felt worse than usual recently. The questions and answers blurred in Link's mind, floating on the other side of his thoughts as if being carried downstream, away from his consciousness. His attention stayed firmly rooted to the infant in front of him, now unwrapped, naked and plump, pale as the wax candles burning above her in the chandelier. She turned in her anxious sleep, lifting a hand to rub one eye, pushing a curl of thin blonde hair from her wrinkling forehead.

She yawned, exposing a few white, round teeth, and turned over. Link, remembering himself, lay a finger to her neck, counting her pulse, and leaned in to listen to her breathing. He could barely tell which rapid heartbeat was his own, which shallow breath came from whom. He couldn't stop himself from touching a hand to her forehead and sweeping back a few strands of her hair. He gulped, loudly, turned her neck, looking for sores, boils or any other indication of illness.

When he lifted her wrists to check her underarms, she opened one eye. It shone blue and curious, and she seemed undisturbed about waking to find a stranger handling her. She appeared more intrigued than frightened, and when he pulled her arms up, gently, she rose with them. She kept her big, round eyes on his, and stood shakily, holding his hands tightly. She wobbled a little as he steadied her by the waist, stared at his wide eyes and open mouth, and laughed.

It was the unrestrained, cough-like laugh of an amused infant. She reached out one hand to touch his sweating nose, palming his face inquisitively. Link's hands shook as he guided her fingers away from his face (they seemed a little too eager to probe his nostrils), and gently sat her back down on the cushions. After a few minutes of silence, during which he had little idea of what he was doing, he wrapped her back up, stood quietly and declared her healthy.

Impa turned from the parents, eyeing him. "It seems all is in order here," she said. "Very well. Thank you." She donned her hat and tipped it in Shaddon's direction. "Because of the threat, we will likely return in about a week's time."

"That should be fine," Shaddon said. His wife picked up the baby girl, but she was now active and awake, watching Link with round eyes from her mother's arms.

"But we'd like to keep the visit confidential."

"Oh, why?"

"Too many visits from too many doctors creates a bit of a panic," she said. "And in my experience, there's nothing that spreads disease more rapidly than panic."

"Is that true?" Gwen asked, bouncing her daughter in her arms.

"Absolutely." Impa bowed. "Then, with your permission, I will see you again soon?"

"Yes, feel free to come any time of day," Shaddon said. "If I am not here, Gwen will be."

"Thank you for your forbearance," Impa smiled. "Farewell, then."

Link followed Impa down the slippery stairs, heart beating so hard against his ribcage he feared it might escape it entirely. Shaddon and Gwen watched them go from the light of the open door.

"Impa," Link hissed quietly. "It's her."

"Are you sure?" she mouthed.

He nodded. He was more sure about this than he had ever been about anything.

Impa turned as she reached the end of the walkway, bowing her head. "Shaddon," she called back to the open door, "forgive me for my incompetence. I forgot to ask: what is the name of your child?"

Shaddon looked at Gwen, and she drew the baby closer to her. She muttered something unintelligible.

"If you haven't yet given her a name, I can write that down," Impa said. "It's just for the records."

Gwen lifted her head. "Zelda."

"Thank you, ma'am." As Impa turned and trotted back into the chilly night, Link repeated the name in his head.

 _Zelda_. He had to admit it did have a lovely ring to it.


	46. Shaddon Stockwell

"I love cold winters. They provide me with a good excuse to spend the majority of my time indoors, with my family. Then again, I have to spend the majority of my time with my family."

Errachella, Eldine Performer

* * *

The news was too important to remain unspoken. Instead of lying relegated to mere symbols pumped from the city's many printing presses, the announcement of the King's return flew from the shouting mouths of messenger boys, passed from district to district, as fast as the snowy wind could carry it. Families of soldiers celebrated the homecoming of their cherished ones, patriots drank ale in the streets and proclaimed their loyalty, old men discussed their admiration of the Mandrag's flawless victory, breathing praise through their smoking pipes.

By the time the message reached Link's ears, the King had passed through Onrago and was well into Faronian territory. At his back marched an army bolstered with new Gerudo soldiers, esteemed dignitaries and eager ambassadors. His patchwork caravan of merchants and civil engineers carried mountains of artifacts, treasures, plans and treaties. One new Gerudo ally especially captivated the interest of the people—an ally that rode in the King's close cabal, constantly, as it was said, whispering to him, reaching out to touch his arm when no other, no matter how loyal, would dare.

There was no doubt in Link's mind; Ganondorf marched home with the rova he'd found in the Colossus. The thought of her sent more than one shiver shuddering from his neck downward, and when he returned to Impa after his morning reconnaissance, newspaper in hand, his panic had written itself all over his face.

She stood at the center of their gloomy apartment, unaided by a mirror, and tied her muffler. She played with the infinite buttons on her waistcoat and closed it, glancing up at him when he walked in. She raised an eyebrow at his nearly tangible anxiety.

"The King is returning," Link told her.

He could not read her expression. "Then we'll just have to be careful."

"He has that witch with him."

She pulled on her gloves and patted the clear brown skin below her eye carefully, checking her fingers for any colored powder that may have rubbed off. "Does he? Is that what the papers say?"

Link nodded. "They call her Barudi of the Haunted Waste. The writers can't decide if she's his ambassador, his seer, or his wife."

"I suppose we will know when they arrive." Impa donned her hat. "In the meantime, I'm due for a few follow-ups. Would you like to come with me?"

"Yes, but… Why revisit the families we know aren't the right ones?"

"Because we are the King's physicians. We have an ethical code. Besides, it would be suspicious to promise a second examination and then not follow through. That's a good way to get people to talk."

Link supposed complaints about the inconstancy of royal employees could impel a curious mind or two to investigate, and that was the last thing they needed. He grabbed his hat, lay the papers down on the table and followed Impa out into the snowy air.

"When do we go see Shaddon again?" he asked.

"Next week." Her breath billowed white and thick in the cold. "Although I'm a little worried he might talk to his friends before then."

"About what?"

"After the initial suspicion, he seemed quite proud to have the King's own physicians personally check up on his family. He might want to brag about it."

"But we told him not to."

"You think a man like that listens to others? You saw the way he spoke to his wife." Link frowned, burying his hands in his pockets. "No, he may tell an acquaintance or two about this plague going around, and someone might send real doctors over to the neighborhood; then we're done for."

"So… how do we keep him quiet?"

"We'll get to know him." The way she looked over her shoulder at him as if they shared a juicy secret brought a smile to his face. "We'll get to know him very well."

* * *

After they had checked up on the city's chosen infants and declared them healthy (except for one pale-faced boy whose wet cough Impa treated with a plethora of foul-smelling herbs), they focused their attention on the man known as Shaddon Stockwell.

They did not confront him in person, of course, but over the next few days, they absorbed plenty of facts about him from peripheral sources. From the records hall they learned all there was to learn about his legal status: married for two years to a daughter of the prestigious (and prodigious) Blackwood family, supervisor and shareholder at Zunari & Sons' second-to-largest textile factory in the city, born in the fourth year of Mandrag Elgra's reign (this, Link realized only after having Impa guide him pedantically through his sums, meant the man was three decades old), no records of criminal activity, and now that he'd received a visit from the King's physicians, declared healthy. On paper, he was a model citizen.

Among his acquaintances and employees he was known to be punctual, demanding, and perhaps a little condescending; a stringent nitpicker of small details, an early riser and all-around wet blanket. His workers were mostly young, poor women, all too willing to spill information about their supervisor to a friendly, ethnically ambiguous stranger offering them a drink, or a kind-eyed Hylian man conducting a study on the happiness of the working class (the pretenses under which Impa and Link spoke to these workers changed daily, and often they would widen their informational intake by visiting the bars at different times, with different disguises).

"He never treated us _too_ badly," one woman told Link over hot mead, twirling a strand of auburn hair between her fingers (that night, he was a lower-class man whose wife was looking for new employment; she had been a seamstress in Riverton before they moved to the city. Impa, somewhere across the bar, was a poet who specialized in writing about women's well-worn hands). "Sometimes he gets mad when we sew a piece wrong and he makes us do it all over. He'll give us some terribly boring speech about work ethic, or something of the sort."

"Those are horrible," her friend put in. They had been sharing a drink and a story about that day's work when Link, interested in their input on where his wife might find employment, interrupted them. They did not seem to mind.

"He's a prick but he's not all bad," the first woman said. "He doesn't grab us or touch our hair when we're trying to work, like my old boss did."

"Or ask us for certain favors," the other said.

"He's the only higher-up around here who seems to be aware of the fact he's already got a wife. Plus, he lets us go home on time. Not many other factory workers get even that."

" _If_ we do everything right. Sometimes he'll make one of us stay behind and redo what we've messed up. But if your wife is a good seamstress, that won't happen to her much."

"Do you know if there are positions open?" the first woman asked the other.

"Not sure, but there's always room in the machine for more cogs," she laughed and raised her glass to her lips while Link thanked them profusely for the information.

Shaddon's peers (some of them, Link discovered, were on the list Sheim had left) visited altogether different pubs than his employees, but they talked as easily about him as the women who worked for him. One friend said he spent too much time at the factory, another said he spent too much time with his family, one of them proposed that ever since the birth of his first child ("Shame it was a girl," said the man, to Link's infinite surprise), Shaddon had gotten boring. He had a habit of showing pictographs of his wife and baby wherever he went, to the dismay of his younger, unmarried friends, who would rather not concern themselves with his domestic life. They simply expressed disinterest, or disappointment when he failed to show his face at balls and parties, or declined when they invited him out to prowl the town from dusk till dawn. It seemed like Shaddon had lost the fire that had once propelled him into their company, but few seemed to miss him. They easily replaced him with other men just like him, from other wealthy families just like his.

Link and Impa plucked seemingly unrelated details from the periphery of Shaddon's life, arranging and stitching them together to form a comprehensive but inexact portrait of him. At first, Link was unsure of the benefits of this exercise, but as he got a clearer picture of the man, he was able to follow Impa's quick thoughts down the wide avenues of possible futures for Shaddon and his family.

In their small apartment, soundproofed by a few Sheikah incantations, they discussed how the man and his wife might react to the revelation that the King's two doctors were not in fact doctors, but Sheikah insurgents bent on crowning his infant daughter as the next ruler of the country. When he said it aloud, it sounded absurd to Link, as he was sure it would sound to Shaddon.

"The question is to whom he's more loyal," Impa said. She twisted her knife in her hand and stepped toward Link (she insisted they practice fighting in close quarters that night, but whether it was to keep up their form or to keep themselves warm, he didn't know). "Will he side with his daughter, or his King?"

Link parried her strike. He panted, unable to answer while concentrating on keeping her knife away from his skin.

She seemed to speak more to herself than to him. "If he proves loyal to his monarch, we may have to steal his daughter." She twisted her body out of the way of Link's swing; even with only half her mind on the mock fight, she could outmaneuver him easily, but this of course did not surprise him. "If he can be persuaded, then we might be able to take the whole family."

Link slid across the floor, cursing the infuriatingly small space of their practice arena; even with the mattress pressed up against the wall, he barely had room to dodge Impa's quick strikes. "To—" he backed up, and her blade caught only air, "Kakariko?"

"Yes, to Kakariko. It will be the only safe place for her." Impa thrust forward, knocking the knife from his hand. She seemed to barely notice she'd won—as she pressed her weapon against his throat and backed him up into the wall, she wore a thoughtful frown. "Getting her out of the city may prove difficult." She lowered her knife. "But we snuck you through the gate smoothly enough in the back of a wagon. A baby will be easier to hide than a full-grown stableboy, I would argue. Then again, babies do tend to cry at the worst possible times."

Link retrieved his knife from the floor. "I cried on that journey, too."

"Quite a lot, if I recall," Impa said. Link abandoned his fighting stance when he saw her eyes darken and settle on the floor, brows knitting together. "Link, we must ensure this child does not share the same fate as the last one." She lifted her face to him, wearing her warrior's mask. "We can't fail again. We just can't."

"I know."

"This is the last chance we'll get." She set her knife on the wood stove and strode to the wall, where she pulled down the mattress. Link could see the sweat glisten on her back, rolling past rapidly appearing goosebumps. His own sweat had already started to dry, freezing against his skin. He bent to stoke the small fire, shivering. "First I need to send a message to Kakariko." Impa glanced at him over her shoulder. "I'm well aware this is not the first time I've asked you this: are you _sure_ it's her?"

And it was not the first time he'd answered with absolute certainty. "Yes."

"Good. Help me reassemble the table and I'll show you a bit about how we interpret messages in our tribe."

When they had laid the flimsy board over the four stacks of bricks that served as legs, Impa fetched a small roll of parchment and some ink. She lay it out over the table and Link watched her carefully spell out a simple message in Hylian script.

 _The baby girl was born healthy. Congratulations to a wonderful uncle!_

"I thought you coded all your letters," Link said.

"So we do. This one contains no incriminating information, does it?"

"No," he admitted.

"The first line means pretty much what it says. We've found a baby girl in good health."

"What about the second, then?"

"To write to an aunt would suggest the baby's parents have some loyalty or extant connection to the old royal family. Or at least, no loyalty to the new one."

"So uncle means the opposite."

"Yes. So far that is all the information I can give."

"That's it? A greeting to an uncle?"

Impa glanced up at him, smiling at what must've been the unimpressed look on his face. "Sometimes deception can be surprisingly simple, Link. We will send this to Old Riko, where a messenger will intercept it at the pigeon loft and carry it to the village." She rolled up the small piece of parchment and lay it at the edge of the table. "In the meantime, I think it's about time we bumped into Shaddon and had a chat."

He gave her a confused look.

"Last night, I was talking to some of his friends—you might not remember, since that merchant kept pouring drinks down your throat. Honestly, you should learn to separate work and pleasure." Her slight smile spread to his face. "One man said that the middle of each week Shaddon eats lunch alone at a pub a few blocks from his factory. They have a special on octorok legs that day." She pushed herself away from the table. "We're going to send the message tomorrow morning, and by the time midday rolls around, find ourselves at a nearby pub that just happens to have that delicacy on its bill of fare."

"What will we say to Shaddon when we get there?" Link asked.

"You will say nothing." She cupped her chin, narrowing her eyes in thought. "And I will say whatever comes to mind."

* * *

It may have been his provincial tastes, but Link did not understand the appeal of meat that wasn't quite yet dead. He tried to tell himself he was hungry as he reluctantly received his slimy meal, still squirming on a bed of greens, from the pig-nosed chef behind the counter. He retreated to the table where Doctor Borville, who having unexpectedly run into an acquaintance at the next table over, decided to strike up an amicable conversation with him. Shaddon did not seem annoyed nor too surprised; he just tore himself from his newspaper and answered the friendly doctor's questions, occasionally popping a small tomato or twitching piece of meat in his mouth.

"I've never had the pleasure of eating it, but a patient told me to try the octorok legs here," Impa said.

"Ah, first time?" Shaddon smiled, perhaps a bit smugly. "I'll warn you; it's an acquired taste."

Impa glanced Link's way as he set the plate of legs on the table. She raised an eyebrow at the strange meat, but reached out and stabbed a slab with a fork. Link's stomach turned at the sight of the white, glistening tissue twitching on the end of her utensil, but she quickly bit and swallowed, to the great pleasure of Shaddon.

"How is it?" he asked.

"Quite good. A little… dynamic going down the throat, but fresh—very fresh. The spices are quite engaging."

Shaddon laughed. "Spoken like a chef rather than a physician. Are you sure you're in the right profession?"

"I'm never sure. Who is?"

"Me, for the most part. But I am one of the lucky ones."

Link skewered his own piece of octorok and brought it to his nose, frowning at its nauseating movement. He wasn't sure if he was courageous enough to eat it.

"So things are going well?" Impa asked, reaching for a leafy green. "How fares the family?"

"Very well. Everyone is healthy as ever. And how goes the research on this vicious plague rampaging through the city?"

Impa laughed. "You make it sound far worse than it is. There hasn't been a single death since we visited you, and the patients we've diagnosed seem to be recovering. I believe it's on the decline, which is the best possible outcome. So hopefully you haven't been spreading word to your friends to lock their doors against this 'vicious plague'—turns out it will pass quickly."

"No need to spread panic, as you say. But still, must you come check up on my family again, if the danger is over?"

"I'm afraid so. It's simply precautionary."

"Well, if you _must_ come over, then perhaps we can turn it into a social visit." Shaddon glanced down at Impa's plate of wriggling meat, and as if impelled by his look, she stabbed another thin slab of octorok and brought it to her mouth. "Clearly you are a man of distinguished taste." Impa raised her eyebrows and swallowed. "What kind of whiskey do you like, Doctor Borville?"

* * *

"I thought the whole family was healthy," Link said. Impa opened her small leather bag and lay the bottles of herbs inside. He did not know why she insisted on going out and buying medicine for their casual visit. She had no one to whom she should administer it.

"That's what I told Shaddon, because that's what he wanted to hear."

Link broke into a mild sweat. "It's not the baby, is it?"

"No." She glanced up at him with something of a betrayed look on her face. "If it was the baby, I would've told you. It's his wife. Remember when he said she was frail, like he was proud of it?"

Link wasn't sure if he could recall anything from that day accurately. He was a little distracted after he saw a face strikingly reminiscent of his dead friend sitting atop the stubby body of an infant.

"Perhaps Shaddon likes his wife looking pale and thin like that. Maybe it's in vogue for city-dwelling Hylians." There was an edge, a disdain in her voice Link found discomfiting. "But I don't. So I'm going to do for her what I can."

She snapped the bag shut and lifted it from the table. Link followed her to the door, pulling his scarf tighter around his neck when she opened it and let in a flurry of snow. She held a gloved hand over her hat to keep it from flying off as she stepped out of their small abode into the wind. He stumbled after her down the steps to the street, still crowded despite the thick snow and the biting wind. The air was so harsh, the sky so fresh and white, it reminded Link of winter in the Eldine mountains. He wondered how the elder was faring, if Talm and Palo were going to stay until spring, what Irma had harvested and stored for the season, or how the winter festival would play out. He imagined the villagers in the snow, chopping wood for the spiritual bonfire, hunting for venison in the forest. Perhaps Irma would throw tradition to the wind once more and serve up a different meat, perhaps Talm would perform that mysterious, disorienting dance and summon the ancient spirits from that uncanny green fire. Perhaps Palo would smoke too much firegrass and pass out before the festival even ended.

All of a sudden, Link's heart began to ache, but he walked on, ignoring the surprising pain. Impa kept her eyes ahead, squinting against the wind and snow, leading him through the white haze of the city streets. It took far longer to reach Shaddon's house than Link thought reasonable, and when he extended his hand to grasp the knocker, he was almost surprised his fingers didn't freeze instantly to the metal.

The door swung open and Gwen greeted them with a smile and a wave of warmth. Behind her, a fire roared in the hearth, and she ushered them in, bowing her head. "You must be freezing," she said quietly, as she helped them remove their hats and scarves. When they had shrugged off their extra clothing, she led them to the fire and bade them sit. She seemed much more comfortable with this visit than with the last—perhaps she simply had time to prepare herself for the role of hostess since they hadn't sprung on her out of the blue.

Shaddon stood in the doorway to the kitchen, badly-shaven, glasses glinting in the firelight. He greeted them with open arms, as if they were old friends. "Welcome back," he smiled. "Gwen has set out some cheeses for you. She would've set out a few spirits, too, if she knew anything about them." He gave his wife a wide smile that she dutifully returned. "Doctor, perhaps you'd like to come to the cellar with me and choose a liquor that suits you."

"A man in his own house knows his own taste," Impa replied. "I trust you to surprise me with something magnificent."

"Ha! An adventurous man; I like that. Very well, I will return shortly." He disappeared beyond the doorway, the patters of his footsteps receding excitedly.

When Shaddon had retreated a safe distance, Impa quickly rounded on Gwen. The urgency in her stare made the woman's pretty blue-grey eyes widen.

"I have brought you medicine," Impa told her. "It is your choice to take it or not."

It took a few seconds of stuttering for the woman to push out her words."W… whatever for? You said I was healthy during your last visit."

"I did. But that was because your husband was hovering over us, eager to hear me say so. Good medicine requires honesty, and honesty does not come into play with him eavesdropping on our conversation."

"But… shouldn't he know?"

"Not if you don't want him to." Impa set down her leather bag and snapped it open, removing a few packets of herbs. "You said you sometimes get tired easily, and sometimes you have trouble getting a full breath."

"S… sometimes."

"There's not much we can do about that, but keep away from factory smoke and try not to exert yourself. The weakness arrived with the onset of adulthood, yes?"

Gwen reddened, but nodded. Perhaps she didn't know what else to do.

"It's a story I've heard before." Impa folded a few leaves between a small brown piece of paper and handed it to Gwen. "No more than half a gram a day will stem any bleeding considerably." Gwen reached out with a shaking hand and took the small paper. "This will last you a few months. You will probably feel better, but…" Impa lowered her voice. "If your husband wants another child, don't tell him about this. It's not likely you'll conceive while taking it. It's what I use. I haven't bled for months."

The realization came over Gwen like a wave of heat. She bit her lip, cheeks reddening, but Link could catch a shimmer of a smile pass over her pretty face, almost mischievous. "You're a—"

"I found one at the bottom of the shelf—the very bottom, can you believe it—ten years aged from southern Faron!" Shaddon announced his return well in time for Gwen to slip her new medicine into the folds of her dress. She intertwined her fingers complacently across her breast and seated herself beside the fire, wiping any hint of recalcitrance from her pale face. Her usual fragile, doe-like expression returned, and she smiled as Shaddon poured three snifters. She did not seem to mind that there was none for her.

He handed the crystal glass to Link, another to Impa, and clinked his own against theirs. "To the good doctor and his silent, loyal nurse," he said. He retreated to the spot beside his wife and took her hand into his lap. "It's good of the King, you know, to provide these checkups. Even abroad he's always thinking of his citizens."

"Well, he might not be abroad for much longer," Impa said, taking a gulp (Link copied her motions—the liquor slid down his throat with a smoothness that surprised him). "Word has it he'll arrive just in time for the winter festival."

"Oh yes, that's right. How surreal is it, to have the wild desert as a part of our civilized country now?"

Impa's displeasure was almost tangible, but her response was measured, jovial even. "To be honest, not very. Gerudo and Hyrulean families have lived in each other's countries for so long, we might as well have started off as one nation in the first place. Look at our esteemed monarch. His family have ruled us for four generations now."

"And there are certainly a few people who have a problem with that," Shaddon shrugged. "In my opinion he's done quite well with the mess his mother left him. He's Gerudo, that's true, but he's definitely one of the saner ones. Just reading what the papers say about the rulers of Obra Garud makes me glad I don't live there—did you know that they feed their own people to sandworms when they break the law? Last week I read that a Gerudo princess had captured some of the King's men to make—close your ears, dear Gwen—sexual slaves of them."

Link raised the whisky to his mouth to keep from laughing. Impa folded her fingers and took a breath, but couldn't hide her bitter smile. "Well, given that the Gerudo Territories—"

"You mean the Desert Province."

"Excuse me. Given that the Desert Province readopted democracy after Ganond left makes me doubtful there were any princesses around to order the kidnapping of the King's men. At least without a majority vote." Impa shook her head, her chuckle subsiding, "Though I suppose the Mandrag has been hard at work dismantling their old system."

"Oh, I don't know, I've never been there. I just read about the place in the papers."

"Personally I don't give the papers much credit," Impa said, teeth gritted. _Especially those published by the King's allies_ , Link almost heard her fail to add. "I've a couple Gerudo friends who let me know what's going on in the desert, and they usually tell a different story. You should meet them."

Link finished his whisky to hide the smile at the thought of Shaddon before Nabru, proudly explaining to her the goings-on of her homeland. He wondered if she would be amused, bewildered, or simply just reach out and pluck his head from his shoulders.

Shaddon did not seem to notice the nature of Impa's tone. "I'd _love_ to, my dear doctor. I'm always trying to expand my Gerudo base. I've got a few friends already, of course, since I do make things out of silk."

"I heard a few higher-ups in the silk business disappeared after Obra Garud fell," Impa said.

"Yes. You may not believe this, but one of my suppliers was the son of that rebel woman who led the army against us."

"Really?" Impa feigned shock so well Link almost feared it was news to her.

"Yes, poor Innar. He really was a good man. Not like the others at all. He didn't deserve what happened to him."

"What happened to him?"

"Well, I'm not supposed to talk about this," he lowered his voice as if anyone but his guests were listening. "But I heard a rumor that some royalists burned down his house. There are a few little groups around the city that are… politically active. He had it coming, of course, saying the things he said, but we all knew he didn't really _mean_ them. He just had to say them because his mother was someone important back in the desert." Impa sipped, listening carefully. Link's eyes wandered to Gwen, who sat perfectly still, perfectly complacent. She seemed to let her husband's words flow past her without the slightest hint of import or meaning. "He was my most valuable partner, you know. I got most of my supplies from him—he'd refine the silk and add the dyes, and we'd make it into parts of wearable clothing. Not whole costumes, mind you, that's work for the haberdasheries, just bits and pieces and sometimes gloves and a few underclothes. But now… well, let's just say for the past few months business hasn't been great…"

He babbled on for what seemed to Link like hours about his employment, about the minute details of making a glove, about who ran which factory and where. Link had to keep himself from dozing off when a small cry sounded from somewhere else in the house, and Gwen pulled herself from the couch with amazing speed. "That will be our daughter," she said. "Excuse me for a moment."

"Of course dear—oh!" Shaddon reached for her sleeve as she made to go. "Do bring her back in here when you're done feeding her. After all, this is still a checkup."

"I will."

"Thank you—and where was I? Oh, yes, it's a good thing that the King's engineers are going to build a new road from Onrago all the way here."

"A new road?" Link asked. Shaddon looked at him as if surprised he could speak at all, but the confused silence lasted only for a second—the man seemed eager to continue.

"Yes indeed. Of course there's already the old road, but that one is a thing of the past—fit for horses and nothing else. This new one—the King's steam engines will ride along it, faster than any cart, straight from the desert to here."

"I heard a rumor about it," Link said quietly.

"Sadly, it's still just a rumor. I've seen prototypes of the engines—I have a few friends who're working on some small aspect of the project—energy conversion, maybe; something dull like that. I haven't much of a mind for science, but I know from a businessman's perspective that this development will launch this country into the future."

"And you into unprecedented wealth, no doubt," Impa said.

Shaddon laughed. "Of course! That's the advantage of progress—someone gets rich from it. I just want to make sure that someone is me."

"I'll drink to your success, then," Impa said.

"Yes, and hopefully keep drinking afterward," Shaddon replied, pouring another glass. "We'll have ourselves a right _temokai_ , as your people call it. Or used to."

"My people?" Impa asked. Her hand, clutching the unfinished glass, hovered motionlessly in front of her face. Link could sense a coldness radiate from her that was not quite fear, not quite anger, but something between the two.

"Sheikah," Shaddon said. "You're not Gerudo, are you? You haven't the right nose for it."

"I suppose not," Impa looked into her glass thoughtfully. "There isn't much Sheikah blood in me, but it shows."

"I think we all have a little. Hell, my great-great-grandmother was a Sheikah princess. Or something."

Impa emptied her cup, moving her gaze to the large ornate doorway opposite the fire. Gwen stood under it, holding a wide-eyed little girl, bouncing her slightly in her arms. The child wiggled against her mother, and when she was set gently on the ground, took a few tentative steps toward them, arms outstretched. "Da," she said purposefully.

"Come here, you lovely creature," her father said, pushing himself from the couch and kneeling before it. She waddled toward him, resolute but wobbly, like a stumbling drunk. She seemed sure of her destination but questioning if she would make it—her soft, sparse eyebrows wrinkled over her big eyes, her hands waved for purchase.

Then she changed direction, abruptly, and stumbled to a halt at Link's feet. She sank to the floor, lifting her eyes to his, body still swaying as if it didn't realize it was no longer walking. Link gulped and knelt to her, reaching out and laying a hand on the tuft of thin hair on her head, above that eerily familiar face.

"She must recognize you from last time," Shaddon said, pulling himself back on the couch. He did not seem upset his daughter had lost interest in him. "She usually doesn't take to strangers so well."

 _Maybe she knows we aren't strangers to her,_ he found himself thinking. He cut himself short; there was no logic in the idea this little girl was the one he had lost over the battlements of the palace. No girl was her own half-sister. But he couldn't shake the obscene thought entirely from his mind, that she looked so similar, even with her undeveloped, round face, and she _seemed_ … yes, it was a matter of seeming, not being, not looking. She seemed the same.

The gold power he and the yellow-haired girl had encountered in the palace took hold of his thoughts, and he realized, with an intensity of emotion that shocked him, that he had found the similarity. Whatever features they shared, whatever differed between them, they were bound, inextricably, to their inheritance. When he looked in her eyes he could see, just barely, that familiar glint of gold behind her irises, a glint he had seen before. He only patted her head softly, and clearing his throat to mask his melange of emotions, and asked where her name came from.

"Well, _I_ wanted to name her after my mother," Shaddon said. "Or at least after someone in my family. But Gwen was insistent. And look at her, look at that beauty. I couldn't resist her."

"It has a noble sound," Impa said. Shaddon had poured her another glass and she sipped at it. "It's quite common in the history books, for daughters of nobles and the like. Gwen, does anyone in your family have that name?"

Gwen blushed and shrugged. "No. But I did like the sound of it. I thought it was… nice."

Shaddon laughed. "She thought it was nice! She rejected all my suggestions in favor of that old name—all because she thought it was _nice_." Shaddon leaned back. "She's right, of course. It _is_ nice. A pretty monicker for a pretty child."

"And by the look of it, a healthy child too." Impa glanced over at Link, who, removing his hands from the infant, nodded.

"She seems fine," he said. It embarrassed him to have his voice emerge hoarse, his words so utterly devoid of purpose. "No fever… has her cough gone away?"

"I don't know," Shaddon said. "I've been working overmuch lately. Darling, has she been coughing?"

Gwen shook her head. She approached her daughter and lifted her from the floor. "She's been well as ever." The little girl finally took her eyes off Link, rested her head against her mother's collarbone and yawned. "Tired, though." Gwen lowered her eyes to the back of her child's head, and a soft smile lit up her face. "She loves her sleep."

"As do we all," Impa said. She cleared her throat. "Speaking of sleep, I'm afraid I can't stay. I have examinations in the early morning."

"Of course," Shaddon said, quickly rising.

"Thank you for the lovely time and the wonderful spirits." Impa fetched her hat and coat, Link following suit. "Hopefully we will run into one another again in the future."

"Of course. If you ever want to find me, I get the octorok special once a week."

"Ah, yes." Impa extended her hand and Shaddon shook it vigorously. When Link did the same, he thought he heard a knuckle or two pop in the man's vice grip. "I'm partial to it myself. I've no doubt we will meet again."

"Good night, then, and good luck with your work."

"You too, Shaddon."

Link suspected the coldness that enveloped him when Shaddon shut the door had less to do with the darkness and snow, and more to do with his decreasing proximity to that uncanny child. He shivered—the wind had died down but he could not help but feel as if his bones would freeze inside him if he stood still on Shaddon's doorstep for too long.

"Gods, how could I ever have doubted you?" Impa said to him. She descended the marble steps away from the warm glow of the stained glass door, onto the icy street. "It's obvious she's the one. If neither of her parents have a Zelda in the family, surely naming her that was Nohansen's idea."

"Is it an uncommon name?" Link asked.

"Now that the royal family has no claim over it, there are more than a few Zeldas running around. Some daughters of nobility have it, some commoners… none are related to the old family, of course. Go to any brothel in Oldcastle and ask the women what name they work under, and half will say Zelda. The other half will say Errachella."

Link tried to cup his chin thoughtfully, but he threw it out to regain his balance as he slipped on a patch of ice. "Hey, Impa, what do you think Nohansen named his other daughter?" he asked.

"There's little use speculating." Impa stopped, perhaps halted by the curtness of her answer. Her condensed breath puffed into the air, lit a sickly green by the moon's reflection in factory smoke. "I know you regret her death. I do too. But we mustn't linger on her. We have to focus our efforts on the child we have now, the one we can still save."

Link lowered his head, watching Impa's boots carve crisp prints in the snow. "So… what? Are we going to steal her from her mother? Are we going to kidnap her?"

Impa shot him a heated glance from under her hat's thick rim. "The same way we kidnapped you."

"That's different. You saved me."

"And we're going to save her too. You do not wish her family to suffer the same fate as the last one, do you?"

"No."

"Then we will remove her from harm's way as soon as we can. I will arrange for a carriage out of the city. She can pass off as your child easily; we will simply make up a story as to why you're leaving the city with your infant daughter." Her mind seemed to have jumped into the future, whereas Link's had lingered behind, floating somewhere in that warmly lit house.

He sighed. His white breath blurred his vision, and he stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets. "I know… I know her parents are of no use to you. I know they are a burden. But for her sake, please, keep them with her."

"You know that will be difficult to do, Link. I cannot say her parents will not turn on us the moment they find out about our goals."

"We can't take her from her mother." Link reached out and gripped Impa's thick coat at the elbow. "Please, Impa."

Her lips pursed, dimples appeared in her cheeks where she suppressed a frown, but Link knew he'd managed to sink a thorn into her. She thought for a moment, lingering at a cross street, then lowered her head in acquiescence. "Her father is very invested in his own life—too much so, I would say. He is loyal to his King, he has money and influence in this city. He will not want to leave. But her mother…" She increased her pace, kicking up snow behind her. "Her mother is fragile, and easily frightened. I can probably threaten her into compliance."

"Well, don't _threaten_ her, if we can avoid it—"

"It will be threatening no matter what. Here is what will happen if all goes according to plan: we will show up unannounced, to her house, without her husband present—it is _crucial,_ if you want her to stay with her daughter, that her husband not be present. We will inform her we know her secrets—possibly more about her secrets than she does. Then we will kidnap her and her daughter. What we are doing isn't pleasant, it isn't noble. I cannot say for a second that it isn't sinister. So don't even suggest that we can avoid threatening her."

Link shut his mouth. He met her gaze when she turned on him, noting its intensity, the hints of determination and even sadness that colored it.

"If you want to be a Sheikah, you must learn our ways. There is a reason we are known as people of shadow. Our lives are not all _temokai_ and hot springs, as Kakariko might have you think. When it comes to the affairs of the world, we resort to what we can. There are so few of us and so many of our enemies, we cannot afford to act nobly. Look at Sheim. He's killed more people than you've probably met in your life, simply because it was necessary. He does not enjoy it." Her face kept its sternness, but when she looked at him, her frown softened. As they crossed the next street, she took his arm in hers. "We will see what we can do. I do not wish any more than you to take a child from its mother. You know this. So we will speak to her."

Link nodded, knowing he would have to be content with what she offered. But he could not help thinking of the child yawning against her mother's breast, or stumbling with outstretched hands toward the open arms of her father.


	47. The Grand Ceremony

"Public ceremony is a time-honored tradition in the Royal Family of Hyrule. The majority of weddings, namings, and funerals take place in the open streets, during which its members and their closest allies march to or from the palace gates, depending on whether someone has joined the Family or left it. The inclusion of the common people in royalty's highest and lowest moments was first suggested by Gustaf VI as a method to assuage the populace and nurture solidarity between nobility and those they ruled. After years of disuse following the Conquest War, Mandrag Garona reestablished the tradition shortly before she died. General consensus was that should her corpse be marched through the streets of the town, unlike her father's, she could be reasonably certain that no one would attempt to desecrate it out of hatred."

Samuel Red, "The Lives and Deaths of the Royal Family"

* * *

The King returned to his city on the day of the winter festival. Speculation abounded whether this was purposeful on his part, or if the gods and prophets had smiled so much at the prospect of his triumphant return they started the traditional festival, hundreds of years ago, on the exact day they knew he would arrive home from this particular campaign.

One woman beside Link, wrapped in a stole of brown fur, said it was a sign of better days ahead, a harbinger of an era of prosperity. She seemed to be talking to no one in particular, and when the motion of the parade caught her eye, she moved away from him to get a better view. He stood beside Impa at the far end of the main boulevard, listening to the distant thunder of hooves in the procession. He clenched his freezing fists at his sides, squinting against the morning light, as other citizens gathered around the edges of the street, talking and laughing. A few quick-minded sellers emerged from storefronts with hot wine and food, well aware that the citizenry may be standing there for the better part of the day, waiting for the King to ride past.

Word had swept through the city a few hours before the procession arrived, bells rang, criers shouted, printing presses shuddered and whirred with frantic energy. Before the sun rose, most of the city was awake, guards flying to and fro, clearing the streets, citizens rising early to find a good vantage point, bakers and grocers packaging food in paper to sell to starving spectators at exorbitant prices.

Link and Impa, of course, were among the first to rise. They bundled themselves in thick coats, slipped their knives in their boots and made their way toward the city center, where Impa was certain they would have the best view.

"I want to get a good look at her," she told him, as they climbed the street toward the palace. "Just to make sure." They both already knew who it was that rode beside the King—but Link could not help but theorize Impa acted from the hope that maybe the King had brought back some other woman named Barudi, some wealthy daughter of a trader, some ambassador or councilwoman, and not the mysterious witch they'd seen rise from the deathly still water in the Colossus. "We just need to be careful no one gets a good look at us in turn."

They wore their long cloaks, with large hoods and shadowy folds that hid their faces, but Link felt as exposed as ever when they approached the districts closest to the palace. He kept his head down, his eyes trained on Impa's feet ahead of him, falling in line with the other citizens on their way to where they no doubt thought the parade would end.

The termination of the march was, of course, what captured the interest of most nosy citizens. No one seemed to be able to decide whether or not this procession was solely a military parade. More than one person, especially those well-informed literates who had followed the King's return day by day via newspaper, theorized the march through the city was not, in fact, simply a return parade, but a wedding. Those who latched onto the idea made their way to the inner districts, where it was likeliest they would receive an answer to that particular question.

Many noblewomen, especially those of Gerudo blood, expressed regret at having not gotten their parents to send a letter to the King's advisors sooner with their proposals. Other citizens looked forward to the imminent announcement of a royal heir. Some, especially those bearded men who thought themselves savvy in politics, praised the King's decision to marry a woman from the annexed territory, to strengthen bonds and alliances between the King's house and the Gerudo people.

Only Link and Impa, and perhaps a few hidden sects of the antiestablishment rabble, viewed the impending (ostensible) marriage with any hint of apprehension. Link did not look forward to seeing that woman again; he did not like the thought of her cold eyes, her blades of ice or the gargantuan sandworm, and he did not like the thought of her beside the King, holding his arm with one hand and summoning monsters with the other. Whatever alliance they had made, marital or otherwise, did nothing but make Link's skin crawl.

When he and Impa found a suitable spot on the small balcony of an empty townhouse (empty as far as they could tell), he managed to propel himself into something of a panic. He bit his lip, tightening his cloak, shivering and jittering against the wind.

"Are you going to be all right?" Impa asked him, half in jest. He nodded. "I can get us something warm to drink as soon as the crowds get here. Then again…" She glanced below them. Climbing back up the side of the building with mulled wine seemed like it would be something of a challenge.

"I'm fine," he said. The distant trumpets and thumping hooves drew closer, and citizens of all stripes filled the streets below, churning this way and that like water until a few mounted guards cleared the road. The people were forced into alleys and onto the sides of the boulevard, chatting and coughing, keeping a keen eye out for the arrival of their King.

Link had a good view of the massive plaza before the palace gates, a place he had not often accessed as a lowly stableboy (the stables were on the other side of the palace, nearer to the less desirable northern reaches of the city). The massive golden gates to the castle grounds glowed nearly white in the winter sun, and as a flurry of well-dressed, fur-hatted nobles gathered around it, palace guards had to continually clear the area, shouting and waving standards to beat back the excited aristocracy.

Halfway to the other side of the city, Link could barely make out the lively patchwork of the parade, decked in the colors of the winter festival. He squinted, leaning out over the balcony, twisting his fingers around the cold metal.

He found himself swept up in the memories of a similar parade. He was a small child then, held on the shoulders of a stableman, reveling in the soundless color of the festivities. It had been nighttime then, the glow of shops and torches lit the snowy street gold as the King had crossed the boulevard, arms spread, his mother's newly-bequeathed crown glinting on his head. Link had been full of ignorant excitement then, a feeling he could not help but recognize in his motions now—biting his lip against the cold, struggling against a lump in his throat he could not quite swallow, heart beating terribly fast against his ribcage. He knew his excitement came from a different place now, but he could not help but feel as if he were still that little boy, held on the shoulders of others, eager to catch a glimpse of a man much nobler and mightier than he could ever hope to be.

A smear of red appeared at the forefront of the parade, and Link could make out golden barding, a black caparison, the flick of a snow-white tail. He leaned out so far across the railing Impa gripped the back of his cloak, but he couldn't help himself. The sight of the familiar animal, even cloaked in such finery, sent his stomach fluttering to his throat.

Epona held her head high, hooves pounding at the snow. The King gripped her reins, leading the procession, red cloak billowing like fire behind him. On one side, as usual, decked in white and silver armor, rode Haema, and on the other, a woman wrapped in a shining gold pelisse. Her hood blew open in the wind, revealing piled pleats of shining red hair. From this distance Link could not see her face, but the way she carried herself and the sinking feeling stirring in his stomach told him she was exactly who he'd feared.

But he couldn't take his eyes off her. His heart raced in his chest, his hands froze against the metal of the balcony's railing, but he couldn't move. He watched the pair draw closer in silence, until he could make out the triumphant glow in the King's features, could see the golden glint of the witch's jewelry, the coloring of her lips. When she and the King drew too close, Impa gripped his shoulder and pulled him away from the railing. The parade passed under them, marching on to the beat of drums and the deafening roar of the citizenry.

Behind the King came the ambassadors, the matriarchs of influential families, and carriages of gold, filled to the brim with gifts of silk and jewels. Dancers and magicians, adorned with silver-trimmed cloaks and wool trousers, scattered between the generals and the vehicles, twisting and stomping and summoning flares of color to the beat of the drums. The train of carriages and fine-cloaked men and women, of soldiers and horses, seemed to stretch endlessly down the boulevard—Link had to wonder if the stragglers of the massive parade had even made it through the city gates yet.

Wherever the cavalcade ended, he did not find out. When the King and his closest allies reached the clear courtyard in front of the palace gates, the procession's momentum dissipated. Carriages and soldiers stopped in their march, the drums fell into instantaneous silence, the cheers of citizens died down and the dancers twirled to a halt wherever they were. The King dismounted from Epona, dropping her reins completely (the horse did not move, as she was taught to do, and the King appeared to have no concerns about where she might wander). He strode to the woman beside him, offering his hand to her as she dismounted. She slid to a stop beside her horse, and a servant rushed to relieve her of the reins. Hand in hand, she and the King marched forward, toward the gates of the palace. A bearded man in a white robe, followed by at least a dozen other aged and similarly-dressed acolytes, hobbled across the snow to greet them.

"I'll be damned," Impa muttered. Link had lost himself so thoroughly in the ceremony below him her voice almost surprised him. "The rumors were right."

Far below, the raspy bellow of the elderly priest rang out across the courtyard. He was far enough away that Link could only pick out a word here and there from the booming echoes, but neither he nor anyone watching had any doubt about the nature of the ceremony. He'd never seen a monarch marry, but from what the books back in Merel's library said, it was not uncommon to perform it in public, before the adoring citizenry. Still, he could not help but feel he was watching something private, something powerful, when Ganondorf rested his hands on the woman's shoulders.

Link, like the rest of the city, could not avert his gaze when the King took the woman's face in his hands and leaned in to kiss her. She tilted her lips up to his, resting her hands on his black-robed shoulders. A terrible, almost deafening silence overcame the entire neighborhood for an unbearable few seconds as the two embraced. When they finally pulled away from one another, a cheer rose from the ecstatic crowd. The King lay his eyes on his new wife proudly, but she, smiling with colored lips, turned her head to examine the people around her. Her yellow eyes wandered from the horses, the expressionless face of Haema, past the carriages and soldiers, past the crowds, up the walls of the nearest abodes.

Link knew where her gaze would land, immediately, instinctively, but he could not move. He leaned over the balcony helplessly as her cold stare wandered from his feet up to his face. For what must've been only a fraction of a second, their eyes locked, and he froze, his heart motionless in his chest. A terrible coldness, wholly different from the chill of the winter air, crept from his stomach outward, paralyzing him. His chest ached, his head swirled, and for a moment, he thought he was falling from the balcony into the crowd below.

But Impa's hand was there, on his collar, pulling him back to the safety of her arms. With an embarrassed cry, he fell back onto her, cold pain still pulsating through him. The witch turned away, again focusing her attention on the King, but Link still couldn't breathe, couldn't feel his legs, couldn't stop the sudden ache pounding away in his head like a drum. Impa held him up, shaking him, demanding to know if he was all right, but he just stared at her, mouth open, waiting for the pain in his chest to subside.

No one took any notice of the man who fainted on the balcony above the plaza, no one cared to watch his abrupt collapse into the outstretched arms of his companion. There was nothing particularly suspicious about the act, for on the day of the marriage of the King of Hyrule to Barudi of the Haunted Waste, it was said grown men burst into tears, corseted women fell breathless into the arms of their husbands, friends clutched one another in a flurry of emotion. Link was not the only citizen to be moved so dramatically by the beauty of the ceremony that day.

* * *

"She saw me," he hissed, in the safety of a tiny, bustling restaurant. It was far from the main boulevard, far from the palace and, in Impa's opinion, far from the wrong type of listening ears. "She knows we're here." Still, he kept his voice low.

"What makes you so sure?" Impa asked. By the time the wedding had ended and the King and his bride had retreated into the palace, Link was again on his feet and clearheaded, but Impa insisted they retreat from the boulevard and get him something warm to drink.

"She did something to me, Impa. She did it when we were…" he lowered his voice to a whisper, "at the Colossus. She hurt something in me."

Impa's eyebrows drew together. "She hurt you?"

"I don't know. She looks at me and I…" He clutched his chest at the memory of the ache. "She knows." He shook his head vigorously, and Impa pushed the cup of hot mead closer to him.

"Drink," she said. She seemed more bewildered than angry at his sudden weakness, and his onset of irrationality.

"We have to get out of the city as soon as we can," he said.

"I know," Impa replied. "But these things take time. I've got the best man I know on it, but our traveling papers and wagon won't be ready for another few days."

She nodded at him and he took a gulp of mead. It wasn't particularly good, but it warmed his aching chest and calmed him down a little. With each gulp of the comforting liquid, his heart beat a little less frantically. "We should send a letter to Merel about this," he said.

"I agree. Especially considering… what she did to you."

Link shook his head. "She looked into my eyes and—I don't know."

"Perhaps we should ask Nabru and Galra about this particular aspect of rova witchery."

"I wish we could. They took Innar and left for Silk a couple days ago."

Impa chewed on this information for a few seconds. "Either way, we'll send a letter to the elder when we get a chance. After we visit Gwen."

Link nodded. He took another big gulp, breathing deeply, slowly, reveling in the spice on his tongue, the feeling of solid ground beneath his feet, the presence of Impa across from him. "I'm sorry," he said, when he felt almost normal again. "For panicking like that."

Impa narrowed her eyes at him. "I don't know if you could help it, Link. That wasn't a normal reaction. It seemed more like witchcraft than you simply being nervous."

He shrugged.

Impa folded her hands under her chin. "Now that I think about it, it seemed more like a curse than anything." She pursed her lips. "Those who have been cursed once before are more susceptible to it. And Balras had put quite a terrible one on you." Link nodded. He'd heard the story before. "What I want to know is how she managed it from afar. I've never heard of anyone being skilled enough to do it without writing the ideograms directly on the skin. But you feel all right now?" Link nodded. "We'll have to ask the elder about it when we get to Kakariko."

The prospect of returning to the quiet mountain village calmed his nerves more than the mead. Still, he took what comfort he could from it, gulping down the last few drops and sighing over the empty mug.

Impa stood, gesturing for him to follow. "Shaddon by all rights should be stuffing his face with that horrid octorok on the other side of town," she said. "He won't be home for another few hours, at least."

Link nodded and pulled his hood over his head. He left a few coins on the table for the barmaid, and followed Impa out of the small establishment back into the street.

The hullabaloo of the parade crowd had died down somewhat, but the word of the King's marriage had not. Men and women on the streets discussed the ceremony, those who had missed it listening eagerly to those who had seen (or pretended to). There were already wild stories circulating about how the magistrates had released a flock of doves at the moment of the fateful kiss, about how so-and-so's grandfather literally died of joy during the ceremony (the poor old man's heart just gave out), or how the bride had such magnificent fiery hair it actually burned through her wedding veil.

After so many months of eavesdropping with Impa, it did not surprise Link to hear these stories. It was almost charming, how absurd the rumors could get, and how far and fast they propagated. Especially in the richer districts, where the wealthy had leisure time to compose and refine such gossip. On the way to Shaddon's manor, there were more than a few well-dressed layabouts picking apart the events of the morning. Link avoided looking at them, preferring instead to occupy himself with his own thoughts. They were passing through a neighborhood familiar to him, and he knew the way well—he kept his head down and did not distract himself with any familiar sights or smells, and he tried not to think about the witch on the other side of the palace gates. He just concentrated, singularly and intently, on the image of Gwen with her daughter, bouncing her in her arms.

He could not anticipate the hand that reached out to grab his shoulder. He lifted his head, jerked from his reverie, and looked up, expecting to see Impa, expecting to hear a command. But the eyes he met were not hers; they were a light, Hylian blue, wrinkled at the edges, a little too far apart, staring bewildered under bushy brown eyebrows.

Link hid his own surprise as quickly as he could. He closed his mouth, narrowed his eyes and slowed his breathing, adopting the closest look to disdain as he could muster. He hoped the man could not hear his heart beating obscenely loudly in his chest, and hoped to all the gods he looked convincingly like a stranger.

The man gesticulated wildly, eyes wide, mouth frantically spelling out the motions of his hands. "Link, my boy, is that you?"

It was the first time he'd heard Talon's voice. The man's speech was what he would've expected, rough, with a provincial accent, as wide and round as his wrinkled face. Link just hoped the complex expressions crossing his features simply looked like a man's reaction to being accosted by a stranger. Impa, meanwhile, had turned, and now stood watching. Link could not see her hands beneath her robe but had no doubt that one now clutched the hilt of her knife.

Talon continued gesturing, palms open, as if he were fending off an invisible swarm of bees.

"What are you doing?" Link asked with as much noble affectation as possible.

Talon lowered his arms. "Is it really you? My gods, it can't be."

"You must have me mistaken for someone else, sir."

Link stared as coldly as he could into Talon's eyes, and the man deflated noticeably. Link's heart sank at the sight of his frown returning, of his eyes dulling. He slumped, his hopes dashed, and he retreated with a demoralized limp. He stared at Link for a few long, unendurable seconds, before he lowered his head. "Aye, I have. Sorry, mate."

Talon sped down the street, bunching his thick coat around him, trotting as if propelled by sheer embarrassment. Link watched him turn the corner, gripped by breathless, aching guilt.

"You knew him." Impa stepped up beside him. She kept her eyes on the corner where Talon had disappeared.

He took a deep breath. "That man practically raised me."

She stood in silence beside him for a moment. "I'm sorry," she finally offered.

"Don't be." Link shook his head and turned, striding beside her down the street. "It seems he's well. That's all I need to know."

"If it is any consolation, you handled the situation beautifully," she said. "Even Sheim couldn't have bluffed better."

Despite the strange ache in his heart (at this point he could not tell if it was a remnant of whatever magic that witch had sent his way, or if it was because of Talon's desperate, saddened eyes), he found himself smiling slightly. "Maybe when we get back to Kakariko you can tell him that."

Impa laughed curtly. "He may take that as a challenge. He will spend the rest of his days trying to outdo you by lying to you any chance he gets." She shook her head. "In a few months you will begin to question your sense of reality."

"He can't do that, can he?"

"He can. He performed one of the longest assassinations in our history by doing just that to a corrupt Ordishman. Sheim kept at it until the man threw himself from a balcony. It's quite an interesting story. I will regale you with the details on the way back to Eldin, if you remind me."

"I will." With a promise of a sordid tale like that, there was no way Link would fail to remind her. She knew how he liked the dramatic stories of distant kings and assassins—she had introduced them to him more than a year ago when she first sat him down in the elder's library.

He looked forward to the trip. He imagined escaping the city once more in their creaking wagon, but this time in the company of a little girl and her mother, bundled against the cold, as Impa told them tale after tale of Sheikah warriors' almost perverse feats of heroism. From the gates of the city to the creaking windmill of Old Riko, there would be no tears, no sighs and looks of regret and longing—there would only be stories, and the budding hope that even though Kakariko's winter festival had come and gone, there would still be some spiced meat waiting on Irma's table.

* * *

Well it's been fun! Today is the day my copy of BotW and I are united, so I figure I won't be leaving my house in a while. I'll emerge from the dungeon in two weeks to post another chapter, though.


	48. Coercion

"The truest measure of the strength of our loves and joys is how much they can hurt us."

Ulrira, "Letter to my Grandson"

* * *

Gwen opened the door for them with a confused but polite smile. "It's… nice to see you again, Doctor Borville," she said, ushering them inside.

Impa took off her hat and followed the woman through the foyer toward the fire. "How is the medicine I gave you?"

Gwen bit her lip. "It's… I don't feel very different."

"I wouldn't expect you to until a few months from now. But let me know if anything changes."

She nodded. "Thank you for your concern." She watched Impa unbutton her coat and slip it onto the back of a chair. She seemed a little miffed at her guest's presumption, but she hid it well. "I'm… I'm afraid my husband isn't here, if you wanted to speak with him. He's still at work."

"I know." Impa's concerned smile had disappeared, and she stared at the woman with an intensity that disconcerted even Link; the first signs of that unfeeling warrior's countenance had spread across her features.

Gwen recognized the drastic change in demeanor. Her smile stayed plastered to her frozen face, but it had lost its warmth. It was now defensive, hovering over her lips like it might peel back and reveal sharpened teeth."So… did you just come to ask me about my medicine?"

"No," Impa answered. Gwen glanced from Impa to Link, and he could see her chest rise and fall with increasing agitation.

"What's this about?" she asked. She backed away, tightening a fist across her breast.

"Where's your daughter?"

Her eyes widened and a look of terror flew across her features. "Why do you want to know?" she whispered. Instinctively, she started to move between Impa and the hall leading farther into the house. Link had heard stories of the great strength of mothers protecting their children, but he doubted she could fend off Impa should the Sheikah choose to steal the child here and now. He just hoped it wouldn't come to that.

"We aren't going to hurt her," Impa said. "Or you. We're just here to talk."

"About what?" She dropped her hand to her side and backed up, bumping into a few pieces of furniture before coming to a halt at the doorway.

"We know Zelda is not your husband's child."

Her mouth fell open, her skin paled visibly, and she backed up, wide-eyed. "Of course she is. Why would you even _suggest—_ "

"You were quite friendly with a man a few blocks over, weren't you?" Impa asked. Her voice was devoid of emotion, which only served to make her queries more frightening.

"N-no, I wasn't." Gwen held her head. "You need to leave. You need to leave right now."

Impa stayed put, and Gwen teetered in the doorway, unwilling or perhaps unable to move. "He lived in a lovely house at the end of the lane. Suspected seditionist."

"I don't know—" Gwen gripped the sides of the doorway."Get out. G-get out of my house."

"He might've been a friend of yours. Or a political ally."

"I would _never_ —"

"Daph Nohansen. That was his name."

A sob escaped the woman. Link could see her knees tremble even under all her layers of skirts. "No! N-no, I wouldn't… he was—I didn't—we didn't—"

"I do not appreciate being lied to, Gwen."

"I _swear_ —"

"Swear all you want. It will not change the fact that Zelda is his daughter."

Gwen seemed to crack open; tears welled in her eyes, and a few drops rolled down her red cheeks as the gravity of her situation overcame her. "Are you from the p-palace? Tell me what you want—"

"First and foremost, we want you to keep quiet about this whole thing. You won't want to spread dangerous rumors—remember what happened to poor Daph. You _do_ know what happened to him, don't you?"

The look on her face told Link the she knew at least something of her lover's fate—and that of his daughter. "P-please…" Gwen said. "He got what he d-deserved… He was a t-traitor. We're loyal, I swear. We're _loyal_ , I didn't… maybe I did, b-but I didn't _listen_ to the things he s… the things he said." She lifted her eyes to Impa, red and swollen, lips drawn back in an agonized grimace. "P-please don't kill her… don't kill me—we did nothing wrong. You c-can't, can't tell my husband, I'll do anything—"

Link could not take the spectacle any longer. He stepped forward, past Impa, hand outstretched. Gwen retreated from him, into the hallway, regarding his hand as one might regard the head of some approaching viper. "Gwen, listen. We're not here on behalf of the King. We aren't even doctors." She stared at him, wide-eyed, but when he took a step toward her, she didn't run. "We both know what happened to Daph and his daughter, and we don't want it to happen to you."

Impa seemed content with letting him try his best to console the frantic woman. She just crossed her arms and watched him approach Gwen, making himself small, meandering indirectly as one might approach a nervous animal. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he continued. He bent down on one knee in front of her, palms open toward her. "I know this frightens you. But we need to get your daughter somewhere safe. You know better than anyone why."

Gwen's sobbing subsided—silent tears still streamed down her cheeks. "You're with Daph's group, aren't you?"

Link was not sure if he should lie to her, so he looked up at Impa, who nodded slowly.

"Please…" Gwen whispered. "Please don't take her from me."

"We won't," Link said.

"Unless we have to," Impa put in, seemingly just to maintain Gwen's heart-wrenching state of terror.

"Please," the woman said. Her voice emerged hoarse and strained from her throat. "I'll do anything. I won't say anything. She's my only daughter, you can't take her from me. I need her."

"And she needs you," Link said. "You and Shaddon. We don't want to separate you."

"I… how will we…"

Impa's mouth curled into a frown she usually wore when thinking deeply about something. "We happen to know your husband has many contacts in the neighboring provinces. Haberdashers, tailors, material sellers, and the like."

"Yes… he does." Gwen was breathing deeply now, hand clutched to her chest. The worst seemed to have passed, and even though she stared at them with glazed eyes, Link knew her head had cleared at least a little.

"Then it looks like a long business trip is in order," Impa said. "Either your husband comes with us, or we'll have to do something to keep him from talking." She paused, narrowing her eyes. "He seems like a talker."

"Don't hurt him, please," Gwen said. "He… he loves Zelda as much as I do… he'll want to be with us. We'll do anything you say… he'll come with us."

"Will he come willingly, though? He's a man who has plenty to lose by leaving the city."

"He is. He _is_ , oh gods." Gwen leaned against the wall, holding her head. A few more choked sobs burst from her, and she wiped her eyes. Link rose from his knees, but did not reach out to help her. He was unsure how he could. "He won't come with us… if he knows… she isn't his child."

"Then we will tell him nothing of that situation," Impa said.

"I… what will I say to him? How on earth can I make him believe any of this? He doesn't know about Zelda—how will I explain that to him? How will I tell him who she is?"

"I don't know, Gwen," Impa said. For the first time in the conversation, sympathy colored her voice. "You will have to figure that out. But if I may make a suggestion: tell him you have some royal blood in you, and passed it to Zelda. Tell him you kept it hidden for safety's sake. He might be angry with you for lying to him about your lineage, but not as angry as he would be if he found out about you and Daph."

Gwen nodded, flushed. "I swear, I didn't even _know_ Daph was the… he had the old family's blood… until I was already pregnant."

"You cannot be blamed for what you did not know, Gwen. I know it will be difficult to talk to your husband about this. But if you cannot do it, then I'm afraid you will not see him again." The woman began to cry anew, but her eyes remained on Impa, her shaking breath slowing to a controlled wheeze. "I believe you can convince him. Think about where his loyalties lie. Will he choose to ally himself with a King he's never met, or with his beloved wife and child?"

Gwen seemed to calm a little at the suggestion. "I will… I will try." She took a few shaky breaths and closed her eyes. "Oh gods… somehow I knew… someone would come for her… I knew it, I knew she would always be in danger, but I hoped it would never… I didn't know who would get here first, Daph's friends or his enemies… and after what happened to him and his…" She sniffed and wiped her nose with the edge of her sleeve. "Where will we go?"

"That, I can't tell you."

"Why not?"

"Because there is a small chance that you may spill too much to a person with whom we do not want to share the information. We don't want you saying anything you'll regret."

Gwen shook her head, tortured frown widening. She lifted her eyes to the ceiling when somewhere upstairs the baby started to cry.

"We are going to leave now, Gwen," Impa said."You will tell no one but your husband. And you may tell him as much as you wish. We will mention nothing about the child's real father." Impa turned, pulling her coat from the chair and pushing her arms through the sleeves. "We will be at your door two days from now, before sunrise. You needn't bring anything but a set of warm clothes and whatever you need for the baby. We will provide the rest." She donned her hat and looked over at the flushed woman leaning against the doorway, eyes watery and red. "We will discuss what to do then. Good luck, Gwen, and stay out of trouble. For your sake, and your daughter's."

When Impa stepped into the foyer and opened the door, Gwen said nothing. Link glanced over his shoulder at her face, her defeated posture, and his heart twisted inside him. He tried to give her his most sympathetic look as he closed the door, but she seemed to stare past him, eyes red with tears, at nothing in particular.

* * *

"You were too hard on her, Impa," Link said. He sat at their small table, staring at his fried potatoes. Normally his head would be occupied by such wants as cream or onions, but tonight he merely wished to banish the image of Gwen's crying face from his head.

"How hard do you think I should've been on her?" Impa growled. She picked up a half-burnt potato with her bare fingers and blew on it before popping it in her mouth.

"I don't know," he answered. "But not… she's so terrified."

"Good. She'll stay inside and not speak to anyone about what happened." Impa raised an eyebrow at the look he gave her. "She's just scared enough to take great precautions. And we _need_ her to take precautions, Link. Think of what happened last time. If Gwen has to suffer a bit now to vouchsafe the futures of both her and her daughter, than I am perfectly content with that. You should be too."

"I know," he said. He sighed, slipping a tasteless slice of potato in his mouth. He fell silent, chewing, eyes lowered.

"It's been a bad day for you," Impa said.

Link shook his head, too tired to even make a quip about the more-than-obvious statement. It was clear to see his fatigue, his disinterest, his guilt. With each passing hour of the day, it seemed more weight was heaved onto his already aching back: the King's return, the his wife's cursed stare, Talon's features sunken with disappointment as he backed down the street, Gwen's abject horror at the prospect of her daughter being torn from her. Every time he blinked, he saw one image that scared or saddened him.

He could not help but wonder why it was these pictures that haunted him—though he, like most, didn't make it through the war in the desert completely unscathed, he did not think he should be so suddenly petrified by the thought of Talon's familiar face. Maybe the images of the battle at Onrago, or the siege of Obra Garud, seemed so much less powerful simply because they were further in the past. He took a moment to think of the pictures that stayed with him when he closed his eyes during that time—the face of the little Gerudo assassin, the bloodied leg of the boy caught in the collapsed home during the siege, the sight of a worm gnashing its way through the gates of the city—he only counted himself lucky that he had no dreams for them to haunt.

"Link." Impa brought him back from his mental digression and he lifted his eyes to her. "You can help me code this message to the elder, if you want." She seemed eager to distract him from himself, and he appreciated the effort. "This one will be much more difficult than the last. It will require concentration."

He nodded. "Sure, I'll help."

He did not help. He was certainly more of a hinderance to Impa, hovering over her and asking only half-decent questions about what she wrote. In the end, when the candles burned low, she gave up on helping him keep up with her—she scribbled down some incomprehensible message in something that was not quite Hylian, but would strike the untrained eye as simply misspelled or messy. There were meanings wrapped in meanings that Link could not decipher, and just when he thought he figured out a particularly intricate code, it turned out the sentence meant exactly what it said. Deception, as Impa said, could be surprisingly simple, but seemingly only when he least expected it.

After a couple hours of frustration, Link finally lay down. While Impa stayed scribbling at the table, he stretched himself across their cold, lumpy mattress and stared at her. He couldn't quite get to sleep, not with the excitement of the day, and Impa's hasty scratching at the parchment. So he waited for her to finish, watching her quill twist and twitch across the paper.

He liked the way her tongue poked slightly from her mouth when she reached a particularly intricate passage, the way she bit her lip and smiled when she figured something out, the way she tilted her head to examine her writing like a proud child. But he liked best how she did not seem to notice these little quirks in her motions, quirks she would no doubt stamp out if he made them known to her. So he didn't. He just watched her closely for the few minutes she worked without him, bringing his knees up to his chest and laying his hands between them for warmth. When she finished, rolling up the parchment and then making her way over to the mattress, he flipped onto his back and watched her pull off her coat.

"Should we the candles lit?" he asked. Impa removed her coat, and grabbing his from a small nail by the door, threw them both over their blanket. Since the first snow, they had taken to piling whatever garments they had to spare on top of their thin sheets for warmth.

"Yes. Gods, I'll have to buy more."

"We've only got one more night, Impa," he said. It felt like a strange confession, a surreal situation. In the desert, he hadn't been sure when he could return to Kakariko, but now that the little village seemed within reach, it bewildered him for some reason. "We don't need any more candles."

"I have this feeling we might freeze to death overnight if we don't get more." She sat at the edge of the bed and pulled her harp to her, plucking a few strings and letting an gust of heat emanate from it. "It'll leak out the window soon enough, but at least we have some warmth for now." She lay down beside him, pulling the blankets and jackets over her. "Are you all right?" she asked.

He stared at the ceiling. "Maybe. I'm… feeling a lot."

"A lot what?"

"A lot of things." He sighed. "Just… _feeling_. Too many things."

She reached over and brushed a hair from his forehead, sending a pleasant shiver down the back of his neck. "It's better to feel too many things than nothing at all."

"I… I suppose." He turned on his side, facing her. "Still… I wish I didn't."

"You're wasting your effort thinking like that," she said. "Wishing things were different will only keep you up at night. Believe me, I know." Her hand wandered to his shoulder and she squeezed it reassuringly. "The man you saw today, he will be fine without you. He may grieve for having lost you, but he will move on. Gwen will be strong, and her husband will be understanding." She did not need to add the _I hope_ that hovered almost tangibly over her words. "Tomorrow I will go check up on the progress of our wagon and supplies. We've got an old friend of Sheim's in charge of the preparations, so I'm sure everything will be in order. You've nothing to worry about."

Link smiled, and she withdrew her hand. When she lay on her stomach and turned her head from him, his smile disappeared. He watched her for a little while, marking the small changes in her breathing, listening to the tiny, incoherent mutterings she didn't know she made. When she shivered, he pulled the blanket higher up her shoulders, and his fingers lingered at the base of her neck, at the tips of the soft hair that grew there. Eventually he rolled onto his back, resting the side of his head against her shoulder. He stared at the large stain on the ceiling, obscenely dark and horribly wide, and as sleep overtook him, as his vision blurred and his mind eased into unconsciousness, he swore he could see it spread.

* * *

The shop windows and street lamps glowed a reassuring gold across the near-empty boulevard. When the parade ended and the King had reentered his palace with his new wife by his side, the citizenry dispersed to bars and restaurants, to homes and alleys, to recount the events of the day, and, of course, dramatize them. There were already hundreds of inflated accounts floating around here and there, about the beauty of the ceremony, the magnificence of the parade, the surreality of the entire affair.

To Talon, though, the most memorable part of the day had nothing to do with the King's wedding or the return of the soldiers and other servants. He had not seen Gorman all day, he'd been so busy caring for the newly-returned animals, the King's own warhorse included. He had intended to invite the stable master out for a drink, but now, alone in the middle of the night, Talon thought better of it. He needed some time to himself, needed to come to terms with what had happened.

It was so brief, and so benign. The young man had dismissed him without a second thought, but Talon could not believe that boy—a boy no longer, he admitted—was a stranger to him. He had not heard many sounds from Link since he was a child, but he did have to confess the man's voice resembled nothing like the memory he had of the kid. He shook his head, twirling his mustache as he approached his favorite tavern.

A guilty thought struck him at that moment, when he wiped his snowy shoes on the doormat to his usual haunt. Perhaps he had stumbled upon Link's family. Yes… surely that was his brother, or cousin, or _something_. Good gods, the kid was probably a highborn orphan; hell, what if his parents abandoned him when they found out he'd been born deaf?

Anger flooded Talon's cheeks at the thought, and he found himself biting the inside of his lip as he pushed the door open. With a jingle of a familiar bell, he walked across the small pub to the bar. The maid stood behind it, now heavily pregnant with her second child, and greeted him when he came in.

"Hello, Talon," she said. "It's pretty late. Are you sure you want to start now?"

Bless her. Always looking out for him. Always looking out for the both of them—back when there were two to look out for. She was the only other person on whom Link's disappearance weighed heavily, if at all. She might've been the only other person who'd even noticed his absence.

"Aye, I want to start now. Get me somethin' hot. It's cold as a witch's teat out there." He seated himself at the bar and turned, glancing at the other clientele. There seemed to be few people here at this hour—a couple regulars, one group of young men who seemed a little lost but still willing to part with their money in exchange for drink, and a lone man a few seats away at the bar.

Talon recognized his straight nose, the poorly-shaven chin, the scar across his eyebrow. He hadn't seen the man since the King left for the desert.

"Viscen," he said, and the man lifted his head. His mouth broke into a crooked smile.

"Talon." He scooted over a few stools and they clasped wrists.

"Glad to see you're not dead," Talon said.

"Me too. It was a nasty campaign but I've survived worse." Talon knew better than anyone the tenacity of the captain. They'd met on the front lines during the Eldin War, two lowly foot soldiers with no aspirations and a fondness for games of chance. It still amazed Talon, thinking back to the War, how easily he and this stranger could bond over something so mundane as a worn deck of cards. They shared practically nothing in common, just a good instinct for gambling and bad memories of Elgra's campaign, but somehow these two things had solidified a friendship that lasted nearly three decades.

"Lemme buy you a drink," Talon said. The barmaid returned with a steaming cup of mulled wine, and Talon told her to fetch another when Viscen was done with his.

"I'm going to need a lot more than one if I want to forget about all the crazy shit I saw," Viscen laughed.

"Crazy shit? Surely nothing in the desert was crazier than Eldin." Talon himself had practically hidden behind Viscen during those days while the strangeness unfolded around him—he'd seen the horrid insides of a Goron when he finally cut one down, he saw the captain fight and win against a Sheikah soldier wielding a sword nearly twice his own size. He'd fought with him through onslaughts of magic and landslides, and the worst Eldine winter in recorded history—what happened in the desert couldn't possibly have affected Viscen much after that madness.

"It was pretty normal until His Majesty decided right outside Obra Garud to gallivant off into the desert. We were right at the walls of the city, and one day he was there in camp, then next, gone. Then General Haema was in charge, and it was quite a sight to see."

"What's a sight about Haema being in charge?"

"The man was wringing his hands like a bride waiting for her husband in the wedding bed. It was one of the most bizarre things I've seen—Haema, standing gazing out into the desert like a pining lover, it was as if he was completely sure the King had died out there. But he came back. With a woman."

"From the middle of the desert?" Talon asked.

"From the farthest reaches of the desert. Gods damn, by the time he came back, we were all sure he was dead. Some of us were even packing to go back home. When Haema wasn't looking, of course. That's when things got really weird, though. Gods, Talon, I watched a sandworm—a goddamn _sandworm of the Gerudo desert_ —this huge, hulking thing, break down the walls to Obra Garud."

"I heard about that. Thought it was bullshit."

"Ain't bullshit. Though I don't blame you for thinking so. That Gerudo woman had the thing under her heel like a timid dog—hell, none of us even saw more than a few spines of it until the battle. But as soon as that monster smelled blood, it came alive. I've never seen anything like it."

"Damn," Talon muttered.

"It was probably the strangest war I've been a part of." Viscen drained his glass and laughed.

"I've had a few strange things happen too," Talon offered.

"Like what?"

"Well… I've been seein' the dead lately." He finished his wine and called for another.

"I've heard only the Sheikah can do that," Viscen replied. "And given that most of their friends and family are six feet under, I can't blame them for trying."

Talon shook his head. "Nothin' like that. It's just…"

Viscen's smile disappeared for a moment. "You talking about your daughter?"

Talon fell silent. He couldn't really say no, if he were to be honest. He'd seen her face in many places since she died so many years ago—mostly on the heads of girls her age. Especially the Gerudo ones, with the shining red hair. Not many Hylian girls boasted that same bright shade, but Malon had slid from her mother with nearly a whole head of it. They'd both been surprised, but pleased—Talon, of course, had no suspicions about the girl's paternity. Despite her bright red hair, she was most definitely his daughter—she had his eyes, and his fondness for animals.

When her mother died and he moved to the city, looking for a better job, he had brought her with him, promising her the world. He had connections in the royal guard (Viscen, mostly), and more than fair skill with cavalry. He would earn enough money to send his daughter to one of those girls' schools in the inner quarters (maybe only a half-decent one, but that was good enough), and there, Malon could do anything she wanted. He told her she could become a dancer, like Errachella, or a teacher, like Lady Ronia, or a singer like the legendary Oracle Nayru. When they first arrived in the city, he'd even hired a man to take a pictograph of her to send to any school who might want a girl like her, but she made him keep it. She only had a passion for horses.

When the sickness took her, he blamed himself for having let her live in such filth for so long. She had never been clean—always with a streak of mud on her face, or horsehair on her clothes, always a scratch here and there on her body, through which any manner of infection could spread. He never left a wound uncleaned, a sickness untreated, but when her eyes started to sink and she spent hours at the latrine, when she lay doubled over in pain for days and could not hold down any food or water, he knew he'd failed her. He did not know with what he should share the blame; the horses, the city, the factory smoke that set everyone coughing on bad days, the tainted well water, the cold winters or disease-ridden strays that crawled through the Capital's streets. In the end, he would never know. And years later, when he was busy with another child, a little foundling boy, it was easier for him to forget exactly who to blame for all of it. Easier, but never easy.

"You're drifting," Viscen told him.

Talon shook his head, lifting his eyes from the circular ripples of mulled wine. He sighed, taking a gulp. "Hey, Viscen. Do you remember that deaf stableboy who drowned in the moat?"

* * *

Well, I've finished BotW and my soul is free! Finally, oh my god. That game ate me alive and spat me back out a pale, screen-blind monster with bedsores and completionist syndrome (though, I skipped right over the Korok leaf sidequest, thank you). I thought it was excellent, even though it might've resembled Elder Scrolls more than it did Zelda. The weapon durability system can die, and the voice acting was something I could've done without, but I adored how this was a Zelda game that was actually, at its core, _about Zelda!_ She didn't get a lot of screen time but damn was she present. She actually seemed like a real person, a flawed, precocious teenager with imposter syndrome (I feel you there, Zelda). And I liked the idea of having to not so much rescue Zelda as help her out. She gets to keep her agency for the most part in this game, which is pretty neat. I wished the divine beasts were longer/harder, would've liked to have seen a human incarnation of Ganon, or a fuller soundtrack, but none of these are really deign flaws, just a matter of taste. Still, a great game, especially if you're into getting killed in exciting ways (kicked by horses, dropping giant metal boxes on your own head, struck by lightning, crashing a mine cart into boiling lava).


	49. At the Capital's Gates

"Despite what other journeymen will tell you about the dangers of the wild, I've found the hardest part of my travel is mostly getting in and out of the Capital."

T.L. Malona, _Life and Travels of a Wayward Bard_

* * *

The pre-dawn sky was clear, glowing a sickly grey-blue above the black towers of the King's palace. It hung devoid of birds, clouds, wind, or sound. Even the factories seemed to have quieted after the King's return; the acrid smell and puffs of dark smoke that usually permeated the air, regardless of the time of day, had made way for a fresh, freezing silence.

Link and Impa seemed to be the only ones up and about, leaving puffs of white breath in their wake. He pulled his scarf higher up his face, to keep the moisture in his mouth and nose from freezing instantaneously. It was a strange feeling, to have his nose hairs crack with ice and pinch at the inside of his nostrils, or to fear that his eyes might freeze over if he didn't blink often enough.

He wasn't sure if he'd ever been this cold before. Even the winter he'd spent halfway up Mount Eldin had been relatively mild in comparison.

"Gods above," Impa said. She hurried beside him, hands deep in her pockets, face bundled so thoroughly between her scarf and hat only her eyes were visible. "This is already such a terrible winter."

Link's toes were numb. He could tell by the way the houses changed from smoke-smelling lean-tos to stately mansions that they were going at a healthy pace to Shaddon's, but his bones and muscles were so cold he could barely tell they were moving. "When we get to Kakariko, I'm going to crawl into the hot spring and never come out," he said.

Impa released something between a snort and a shiver. "I'll join you. We can ask someone to bring us hot rice wine while we're in there."

Link did not dislike the idea. "And some spiced meat," he said.

"Mm…" A visible shiver crawled its way through Impa, and he could hear her teeth chatter behind her scarf. "Some of my mother's infamous Faronian chicken stew."

"Maybe if we're lucky, she'll make us those sweet cakes," Link offered. Suddenly the measly breakfast of cold bread he'd taken with Impa not an hour earlier seemed insufficient. Perhaps it was the cold, perhaps it was the thought of Irma's cooking, but an acute tremble rumbled through his stomach.

"We can fatten ourselves up," Impa suggested, "and then sleep through the rest of winter."

"Then we can wake ourselves up in the river," he suggested.

He couldn't see much of Impa's face, but he guessed there was a smile under all that cloth somewhere. "I'd rather not think about the spring dip," she said. "We must focus on what's important—hot springs and sweet cakes."

The ornate balustrades of Shaddon's stately home rose in their sight, metal glowing under the strangely clear light of the approaching sunrise. Link and Impa fell silent as they walked up to the heavy door. Through the colored glass, he could make out the dim glow of candlelight and the slightest movement of shadows. Evidently Gwen and Shaddon were awake and waiting for them.

"Link," Impa whispered as she stopped before the door. "Ready your knife."

A shiver wholly separate from the chill of winter swept through him. "Why?"

"There is a possibility we will find the royal guard instead of Gwen waiting for us."

"Do you really think so?"

"I don't, but we must always err on the side of caution."

With that, Impa reached out, gripped the lion's head knocker and tapped it lightly on the door. Link's hand moved to the hilt of his knife, and he slipped into a wider stance, heart thumping in his throat.

When the door swung open, Gwen stood before them, infant daughter in her arms. Link let go of his weapon with a sigh. She had bundled herself and her child accordingly in dark colors, in furs and thick wool, and had stuffed her hair into a woolen cap. She had clearly readied herself for the occasion, but her eyes were the same shade of teary red as they had been when Link had last seen her. Her face was sunken and pale, her lips chapped and curved down in a worried frown.

"Is Shaddon coming with us?" Impa asked, leading her out onto the steps.

"Yes, I'm here." He emerged from behind his wife, words raspy with agitation. "Although I resent the methods—"

Impa shushed him, harshly. "You're done talking for now, Shaddon," she said. "Now's the time for listening. And do so carefully." She turned, helping Gwen descend the steps to the icy street. In her arms, her child wiggled, sniffing and whimpering in the cold. "Close the door behind you."

With an aggrieved narrowing of his eyes, Shaddon did as he was told.

"Follow me, and be quick about it." Impa led them down the steps, off their property, into the dark, quiet street. "There is a man waiting for us a few blocks ahead. He has a wagon with him. Inside there are all manner of things relevant to your trade—silks, supplies, paperwork… there are extra clothes for you and your family, and any comforts a man of your status might take with him during a long business trip. These are yours to use at will."

Shaddon nodded. He removed his glasses and wiped some icy condensation from them before replacing them on his large nose.

Impa quickened her pace, leather shoes crunching ice beneath them."We are going to leave some possessions with you as well, since you're of a class not likely to be considered suspicious."

She turned a corner, motioning to the end of the darkened street, at the hunched shadow of a lone wagon. A cloaked man sat at its front, and a grey donkey lounged yoked to the cart, shaking its head.

"At dawn, when the city gates open, you're going to go through." She approached the cloaked man, and he slid from the driver's seat. They exchanged a silent handshake and he disappeared without a word, back into the alleys of the city. Impa helped Gwen up the side of the vehicle, and got her settled in the seat. Zelda, wiggling in her arms, started to cry.

"What excuse do I have for making this trip?" Shaddon whispered.

"An acquaintance in Old Riko has offered you the partnership of a lifetime. You're unwilling to divulge fully in case some competitors are listening in."

"What if the guards don't believe me?"

"You're a fine talker, Shaddon. You'll be all right."

He gave her an incredulous frown and climbed up beside his wife, who busied herself with shushing her inconsolable child.

Impa sighed, removing her lyre from her back. She held it close and strummed a few notes, quick, soft and deliberate, and the child fell silent in her mother's arms. Gwen's eyes widened, and she did not take them off the strange instrument as Impa rounded the wagon and placed it inside.

She was quickly at Shaddon's side again. "You will go through the gate well before we do. Once through, you will not wait for us. I cannot stress this enough: _you will not wait for us_. You will go to Old Riko, as intended. You will not stop until you get to the town. We will meet you there. If by some chance we don't, there is a book in the toolbox in the back of the wagon entitled _Ordish Children's Stories_. Each day at high noon, read this book on a bench in front of the Old Riko Playhouse."

"I'm a grown man," Shaddon started, "I can't be seen reading—"

"Every day. You will read this book in front of the Old Riko Playhouse. That's how my tribe will know it's you. Someone from Kakariko will come for you, and tell you what to do next." Impa patted his leg. "It's unlikely we will have to resort to that. Do you understand what I told you? Should I repeat myself?"

Shaddon shook his head. "This is absurd," he muttered.

"Indeed," Impa replied, and backed away from the wagon. "We'll catch up to you on the road. Keep Zelda safe until then." She nodded to Gwen, then to Shaddon, and the man seemed to roll his eyes as he nudged the donkey into a steady walk.

"Do you think he knows how to drive a wagon?" Link asked her, as the vehicle creaked away into the darkness.

"I didn't, and I brought you from here to Old Riko in one piece. They'll be fine," she replied. But she did not take her eyes off the family until they rounded the corner and disappeared.

* * *

Dawn arrived faster than Link had anticipated. He and Impa lounged on the side of the road leading to the city gates, eyeing the queue of wagons and carriages increase in length seemingly by the minute. Impa leaned against a streetlamp, arms crossed, and watched Shaddon's wagon creep toward the gate, lodged between a party of what appeared to be Gerudo tradeswomen and a caravan of farmers. Link rubbed his hands together, partially to alleviate some of his anxiety, partially because he was sure if he didn't, his fingers would snap off like icicles. When Shaddon reached the small group of guards in charge of inspecting papers, he gestured dismissively to them. Link could not make out their vein of conversation, but he had a fair idea that Shaddon was not outing himself as a traitor. From this distance, it seemed mundane, curt, and interchangeable with any other guard-to-citizen interaction.

But Link still held his breath as the guard looked over Shaddon's papers, gestured to his wife and child, then the contents of the wagon. For an agonizing moment Link was sure the guard would reject their passage, but the man seemed disinterested in harassing a wealthy businessman and his wife. After all, there were usually consequences for inconveniencing people with money.

Link released his breath when the guard waved them through and they disappeared beyond the open gates. The tension in Impa's shoulders seemed to disappear, and she slouched a little, letting a small smile pass across her face.

"I suppose it's time for this medical student's rounds to end," she told him. "You've learned quite a bit in the city, have you not?"

"I have," he answered, truthfully.

"What did you learn about?" she asked, checking her pocket for their credentials and making her way toward the gates.

"Plagues," he answered. "How they spread and how to contain them."

"And?"

"And that privacy and honesty are necessary for good medicine." She smiled at that—perhaps she was pleased to hear him quote her nearly verbatim.

"And what else?" They moved along the lines of caravans and travelers, shivering with the rest of the crowd.

"And… that octorok meat is terrible."

Impa chuckled. "I thought that was common knowledge."

They moved a few places in line as the sentries waved a whole caravan of traders through without inspecting their papers. Link figured it would've taken more time than the guards were willing to spend on that particular group of loudly-complaining merchants. He took it as a good sign—perhaps even the royal sentries were willing to let a few citizens slip through the gates without proper inspection. Many of them seemed more concerned with warming their hands than looking through papers.

Link and Impa waited patiently for their turn, watching the gates and the half-lowered portcullis' looming approach. The closer they got to the gates, the tighter Link's stomach knotted, the wider Impa's frown spread, and by the time the nearest sentry approached them and asked them for proof of their legitimacy, Link's hope and eagerness regarding Shaddon's success had been wholly replaced by anxiety for his own.

Impa handed their credentials to the guard, and he opened the papers, looking them over with a raised eyebrow. "Where are you going?" he asked.

"Old Riko. We spent some time learning medicine in the city."

"Ah. All right." He stared at their papers, eyes narrowed, so intently and so thoroughly Link had to consider the man may have been illiterate. After too long, the guard lifted his eyes to Link, stared at him for a few seconds, then adjusted his gaze to Impa. "Doctor, huh? Well." He shrugged. "Off you go, then. Wait—" He reached out and gripped Link's arm. His heart bounced into his throat, but the guard just pulled him out of the way of a passing pair of oxen. "It's getting crowded here, yeah? We're gonna open the little passageway to civilians on foot. Wait here for a spell." He leaned over and yelled seemingly at the city wall, where the door to the watchtower opened and a well-bundled guard ambled out. The sentry led them away from the chaos of the main thoroughfare, letting animals and carriages pass by unhindered. "Open the small gate," he told his comrade.

Link felt Impa tense beside him. The sentry still held their papers, but she did not seem concerned with reclaiming them. The man who had emerged from the sentry tower turned on his heels and walked back to it, stopping only to whisper fervently to another guard. Impa reached down to finger the hilt of her knife hidden at her waist.

"Impa?" Link whispered.

"There is no small gate."

As the sentry spun on his heel to return their papers, a bored smile on his face, Link heard the slight shuffle of feet behind him. It was quick, deliberate, wholly different than the footsteps of passing civilians. He sent Impa a panicked glance just as the guard in front of them, clutching their traveling papers with one hand, drew his sword with the other.

Link did not have time to consider the mistakes they might have made. He did not know if the guard who'd read over the papers had recognized them as forgeries, or if Link and Impa had roused his suspicion some other way. He did not know if word had spread about two charlatans posing as royal doctors, or if they had been seen fraternizing at the Last Resort with undesirable characters like Innar, or if Shaddon himself had informed the guards about them. He froze that mystery in his head, instead concerning himself with backing away from the man with the sword, and turning to the men behind.

He twisted himself just in time to catch a guard reaching for him, and slipped his arm out of the man's eager grip. He retreated sideways, keeping Impa at his back. Quickly, without fully thinking his actions through, he pulled his knife and slashed at the sentry's outstretched arm. The blade slid across gauntlet harmlessly, and the man stumbled toward him undeterred.

Link's eyes darted between the guard and the open gate, packed with travelers. He counted three soldiers on his right, and two more between him and freedom—he could not count the number of sentries pouring out the door in the wall.

At the appearance of weaponry and the shouts of guards, the buzz of the citizenry escalated to mayhem. Someone shouted, an animal spooked, and the crowd around them burst into chaos. Impa wasted no time launching herself away from the guards and into the panicked travelers, and Link followed, wriggling his body away from the groping sentry. He rushed headfirst into the crowd, tumbling past oxen, frightened merchants, wide-eyed children clutching their parents' arms and squealing, half-delighted and half-terrified at the sudden commotion. The guards stumbled after them, shouting for the rabble to clear the way, keeping their spear tips high above the crowd. Some obeyed, pulling their animals and children out of the way of the cabal of guards, others blocked the road, frozen in confusion or wrestling with their panicking beasts. Some travelers took this as permission to make for the gate without the hassle of fees or paperwork, so more than a few brave men and women jumped toward the portcullis almost as fast as the two outlaws that had started the commotion.

Impa launched herself from the cobblestone, pushing off a large wagon wheel and practically running along the shoulders of frightened travelers and their animals. Link knew better than to copy her—he rolled between horses' legs, shoved his way past merchants, pivoting around the skirts of startled ladies, keeping low to the ground. He wove in and out of the crowd, riding the wave of tumult, away from the shouts of guards and the multitudes making way for them. Somewhere ahead of him, Impa soared through the chaos—the best glimpse he got of her was nothing more than the quick flash of her blade when it caught the harsh sun. But he was not watching for her—he never took his eyes off the endless blue Lanaryu sky, glowing brightly under the arch of the city gate.

A bone-raking, almost paralyzing screech met his ears, and he lifted his head for a moment, just a moment, to the stone arch of the thick wall ahead of him. The metal of the portcullis screamed as it descended, chains rattling. Blades of black steel plunged toward the stone, and people jumped from its trajectory, trying to pull their petrified animals after them. Link quickened his pace—with each inch the portcullis gained, it descended faster—but he was only a dozen steps from it—now a half dozen—

With a terrible crash, the gate smashed to the ground, taking one stubborn, unlucky ox with it. The animal screamed as the metal rent its back, crushing its spine and pinning it to the stone walkway as the lower spikes of the portcullis met their designated notches. Its blood splattered across the ground as Link skidded to a halt at the metal. He threw his fist into it with an angered cry, but no amount of force could move it. Beside him, the ox died loudly, and behind him, the crowd parted for the approaching guards.

He blinked at the surprised citizens on the road beyond the bars, at the endless plains of green now too far for him to reach. But he could not indulge himself in frustration for long—Impa appeared beside him, knife at the ready. He turned, weapon in hand, and watched the crowd disperse for the oncoming horde of soldiers. What had once been four or five pursuers was now a crowd of at least a dozen, armed to the teeth and clinking angrily toward them.

Link's knife shook in his hand, and he backed up against the portcullis, breath quickening. The temptation to surrender must've been written all over his face. "Don't you dare drop that knife," Impa hissed. She twisted hers in her hand. "If we die, we die here, and take our secrets with us."

He nodded, trying his best to banish the fear from his heart. Pushing the thick dread from his mind was like squeezing molasses through a sieve, but he grit his teeth and vowed to follow her to wherever this fight took them. When he blinked he saw the image of Zelda, tucked safely in her mother's arms, and he knew it was better for him to fall here than to let the royal guard interrogate him about her. He gulped and took a wide stance beside Impa, readying himself for the onslaught.

"Follow me," she hissed at him. She lowered herself, knife at the ready, and charged the first sentry that came her way. He gripped his spear in both hands and swung it low and wide, but she twisted her body, throwing her legs over her head. They rotated elegantly above her like long, straight hands on a clock, and she landed safely on the other side of the guard. Before he could even retract his spear, she was back on her feet and dashing into the crowd.

In the man's slow confusion, Link hurtled past him, avoiding the wandering tip of the spear, and crashed back into the throng after Impa. He knew she hoped to lose them somewhere in the crowded streets—after all, they had lost their chance to leave the city. But if he could just keep up with her, they could shake off the guards, consolidate their resolve and try again, some other, different way. He hurdled over a broken cart, flying past its yowling owner trying to pull his bullock from the splinters, and soared through the gibbering, flowing torrent of people. He lowered himself and descended into the panic, keeping an eye out for Impa ahead of him.

The wave of soldiers turned and changed their trajectory like a flock of confused, metal birds. They stumbled after him, again shouting to clear the way, but the throng was now so disorganized, they could not figure out which way to clear. So they clumped together some places and dispersed in others, hindering both the guards and the two wrongdoers they chased.

As Link approached the end of the line, where the crowd thinned, he increased his pace. He had lost Impa, but they knew to meet back at their tiny, freezing lair if anything were to go awry. They would just have to take a circuitous route to get there—a route on which they would both have to lose this ever-increasing number of guards.

He debated in his frantic mind whether to turn left and descend into the slums, or to keep straight and try his best in the mazes of boulevards that comprised the mercantile district. Perhaps it was this difficult decision that left him blind to the obstacle in front of him, perhaps it was simply the general panic of the situation. But when he caught his foot on a taut rope, when he dropped his knife and threw out his hands as the ground flew toward his face, he did not have time to debate the source of his sudden ungainliness. He just tumbled, mind blank with dismay, and rolled to a stop in the middle of the street.

He lurched to his side and pushed himself from the stone. Just as he pulled himself to his feet and took the first step of his tumble onward, something large hit his back with stunning velocity. His lungs emptied, his eyes widened, and before he could even fall to the ground, someone had grabbed him about the waist. He kicked, crying out, as a cold hand clutched his wrist and twisted it behind his back. A foot smashed into the back of his knee and he gasped, toppling onto the stone face-first. His muscles burned as his arms were tugged behind him—a knee dug into his shoulder, a gauntlet into his neck, and he was pushed into the stones, harder, harder, his cheek pressed against the cold ground, until he couldn't breathe, oh gods, he couldn't breathe—


	50. In Darkness

"Darkness without the glint of stars; that is my worst fear."

Professor Shikashi, Royal Astronomer

* * *

All he could feel besides the ache in his body was the freezing ground beneath it. Something pounded in his head as if it were trying to escape, pulses drumming against his skull in rapid succession. He could not feel his hands, he could not move his feet, and when he opened his mouth to groan, he could only exhale a painful, voiceless breath. His own weight seemed to hold him against the ground, and when he tried to bend his legs, a white jolt of pain spread from his knee to his hip. He struggled against his own eyelids, but the caked mucus on his skin and eyelashes held them shut. After a few minutes of lying paralyzed in the cold, he managed to lift an arm. Muscles aching with effort, he lay his freezing fingers over his face, and wiped his eyes, picking at the mucilage that had fused his lids shut. With each rub of his fingers, his head throbbed a little more, pain pounding behind his eyes all the way down to his jaw. He rubbed his temples, ran a few fingers through his hair, and discovered he had lost his hat.

When he finally managed to crack his eyelids open, he saw nothing. He blinked, rolled his eyes in his head, blinked again—but he could make out no shapes, no color but inky black. He tried to groan again; this time, a wheezing, pathetic rasp squeezed out from his lips. He struggled to roll to his side, pain shooting from his waist to his shoulders. His fingers probed the ground beneath him—hard stone, cold to the touch. With a wave of nausea, he pulled himself onto all fours, head dangling with aching pulsations between his shaking arms.

Slowly, the events of the recent past returned to him. Somewhere in the darkness of his vision, he saw Impa, running through a startled crowd ahead of him, he saw the glint of armor as the guards pursued them, the grey blur of snowy cobblestone rushing up to meet him. His heart started to race as the implications of his imprisonment dawned on him.

He groped around for any sign of Impa. He called her name a few times, his hoarse voice echoing closely around him. It seemed he was alone in the small chamber. When he shakily pushed himself to his feet, he found the ceiling out of reach. He crept to a wall, hands trembling, and ran his fingers along the stone, tracing out the perimeter of his cell. When the rough, uneven surface of rock gave way to smooth metal, he stopped to feel the tall, elongated rectangle of a solid door, unadorned with a window or handle. He tried to push his fingers into any cracks in the frame, tried to find any purchase or weakness in its shape, but could find nothing noteworthy or encouraging. It quickly became clear to him he was not going to escape, at least through the door.

So he dragged himself back to the corner of the room. He slid down against the wall farthest from the door and stared, waiting for his eyes to adjust so he could discover more about his current surroundings. But the darkness was absolute; no matter how long he blinked, how long he moved his teary eyes this way and that, he could see nothing.

He wondered where he was—this was not the same sort of cell that he and Impa had been thrown into at their first meeting. Those were reserved for petty criminals caught on the King's property: vegetable thieves and trespassers, defiant slaves or servants who had slipped one too many treasures into their breast pockets while cleaning. Those torchlit chambers were not like this one, with its dark, stale air and its thick windowless door, its freezing floor and complete, oppressive silence.

He supposed his current location depended on the nature of his crimes. If his forged papers were the cause of his imprisonment, he would no doubt be in some holding cell beneath the Capital's outer wall, or in one of the many gendarmeries scattered about the city. If he were thrown in this dark chamber for the crime of impersonating royal personnel, he would probably find himself in front of a high court soon enough. If he were wanted for treason, however—

Link thought of what Shaddon may have said to the sentry guarding the city gate before he urged his cart through. For all he knew, the man could've told the soldier anything—or worse, everything. He could've slipped the guard a hint about the two doctors that followed him out of the city, he could've informed him of Link and Impa's suspected involvement with Daph's old insurgent group. Hell, for all Link knew, the man could've implicated his own infant daughter as a pretender to the Dragmires' throne.

"Damn him," Link muttered. His voice echoed absurdly loud through the stone cell, but he could not stop himself from repeating the words. Over and over, he cursed Shaddon, his certainty of the man's complicity in his capture growing with each second.

Of _course_ he had told the guard. Link could not recall if it was the same sentry that had inspected his own papers, but he knew word could travel fast among soldiers on duty. Goddesses damn it, he and Impa should've left the city right behind the traitorous bastard. Then at least the royal sentries wouldn't have had time to rally themselves and close the portcullis before he had time to escape. Maybe, if they had followed Shaddon more closely, they would've made it out.

Perhaps Impa still had. Link held onto the image of her soaring over the crowd effortlessly, knife glinting. He focused steadily on it, hoping to all the gods she'd made it away from the guards in time. Perhaps she had found another way over the wall and was now screaming through the fields of Lanayru toward Shaddon's wagon. Perhaps she had made her way back to their hideout, or lurked somewhere outside of his prison, planning to spring him, while he sat useless and helpless in the dark. He leaned against the wall and pulled his knees tight against him, hanging his head between them. He apologized inwardly, fervently, as he had done every time he'd disappointed or impeded her. He could only hope she had made it out of the city in time, that she had caught up to Shaddon and quickly and violently separated him from his wife and daughter. He tried to imagine Impa, Gwen and Zelda in tow, pulling their humble cart into the turning shadow of Old Riko's creaking windmill. Zelda's big blue eyes would widen at the sight of those monstrous rotating arms, at the glint of colored glass in the Playhouse's windows, at the bustling snowy streets. Perhaps they had all made it far enough away from the city to be safe, maybe they were still hurrying past Oldcastle; Link could not tell how much time had passed since his capture. The way his stomach rumbled suggested it may have been the better part of a day.

He lowered himself to his side, folding his hands beneath his cheek. One by one, he explored the possible outcomes of his imprisonment (of course, he would've found this mental exercise easier if he'd been at least partially aware of the realities of his situation), but they ran the gamut from a swift release for mistaken identity, to a slap on the wrist for his forged travel documents; a fine and prison time for false impersonation, to a public beheading for treason. He could not help but linger on the image of an axe falling on his neck, severing his head from his body in a violent, bloody thump.

Talon had taken him to a public execution once. He did not hear the sound of the criminal's head leaving his body, but he had felt it through his feet. When the executioner's blade had met the block, the impact traveled through the wooden platform, through the stone streets and up Link's shaking legs. It was a sound—a feeling—he would not easily forget, and one he had always hoped to avoid in the future.

And now, it might be him up there, head rolling to the feet of a cheering audience. Maybe the sound of an axe tearing through him to land thickly into wood would scare another little peasant boy into compliance. _Maybe it is just as well_ , he thought. _Perhaps my purpose is to serve as an example. I'm certainly not fulfilling any other role._

But he dreaded the thought of dying before he saw the little girl again. He hoped Impa could tell her why he had been killed, or at least the girl would retain some memory of him—as much memory as an infant could, at least. If he could linger as an unconscious thought in the back of her mind for years to come, he would have to content himself with that. Especially if he could not watch her grow up into the spitting image of a lost friend.

Though he still did not know if she would have the opportunity to grow up at all. If Shaddon had revealed too much to the guards at the gate, they would no doubt come for her. Link wondered if the man even cared, but he had to admit he could not guess what Shaddon might feel or do. Maybe he had turned their cart around and returned them to the Capital after he'd sold out Link and Impa. Perhaps he'd handed over his own family to the royal guard. Perhaps he kept riding, kept driving that clattering cart out into the countryside of Lanayru, wearing that self-satisfied smirk as he thought about the impending arrest of the doctors who had uprooted his life, harassed his wife and made a fool of him.

Then again, perhaps Shaddon was not to blame. Perhaps it had been Link's own clumsiness, or Impa's negligence regarding some otherwise trivial matter. It could've been anyone—the man who had secured a wagon for the Stockwell family to leave the Capital, or any wandering spy who had overheard too much in the Last Resort. Or, worst of all, it could've been that witch—she had certainly noticed him the day of the wedding ceremony. He clenched and relaxed his fists, partially to alleviate the agony of sorting through all the insurmountable possibilities, partially because it distracted him from the aches and pains pulsating through other parts of his body.

Maybe he would find an answer before long, maybe he would languish in the dark forever. Either way, he had nothing to do but close his eyes and hope that when he opened them again, there would be some light, some movement, some indication of his fate.

He could not sleep, so he ran his hands against the floor beside him, counting the pocks in the stone.

* * *

When the door to his cell opened, metal wailing torturously on its rusty hinges, a wave of flickering torchlight blinded him. He raised one arm over his face, pushing himself to a sitting position with the other. He crossed his pained legs under him, squinting over the shadow of his forearm to the figure in front of him. As his eyes adjusted, he could make out its wide shoulders, its small head, the way it occupied the doorway as an army might occupy hostile territory, and he could tell the owner of the silhouette was entirely too pleased to be there. Two guards stood behind it, helmeted and caped, torches raised high. In the light of their fires, he could make out a few stray hairs of the shadow, backlit orange-white and waving past a long, pointed ear.

Link knew the man before he spoke. But when his voice filled the room, booming like a shout, he could not help but grit his teeth. Haema being his first visitor narrowed the possibilities of his future. He could already feel the chopping block under his chin.

"We meet again, kid."

Link caught himself between the desire to stand his ground and the overpowering instinct to kneel before the man in silence. He hovered, half-bent, just a few inches from his usual obsequious bow, but he knew the general would not fall for the wiles of a subservient stableboy. His secret had been revealed in Obra Garud, when Link had raised his sword against him. There was no doubt in either of their minds as to Link's allegiance in that particular battle.

So he did not bow, he did not grovel, he did not hope that if he could only maintain a convincing mask of innocence, he would somehow find a way out of this situation. He just steeled himself for whatever words the general had for him.

In retrospect, he should've guessed how their conversation would begin. When Haema lifted his boot and kicked Link in the sternum, knocking him back against the wall, he knew he shouldn't have expected any less. After he fell to his side, breathless, the general adjusted himself and kicked him again, this time in the tender spot beneath his ribs. Link writhed, releasing a cry as a sharp web of pain sprang from his gut to every part of him. Haema leisurely floated to his other side, giving Link just enough time to flail into a different position, before striking him between the shoulder blades. The general stood in silence for a few seconds, watching Link stretch out, attempting to assuage some of the agony with useless twists of his torso, before beginning the routine anew. He struck at Link's ribs, his stomach, his arms as they flailed uselessly, trying to stave off the blows.

Link did not know how long he lay curled under Haema's boot. He did not know how many strikes the general delivered to his body, he didn't know how long the man hovered over him, panting lightly as he rested his foot, he could not count the number of pained grunts he released despite telling himself over and over to deny Haema the satisfaction of hearing him cry out. He just balled his fists, tried his best to protect himself, and failed utterly.

The guards in the doorway watched silently, motionlessly, holding the torches high so their general might see where his foot struck. They seemed quite accustomed to this kind of routine.

After one stray kick split Link's lip and left him sputtering blood onto the stone, Haema bent to him as if to ensure he was not too badly harmed. He looked over him, harsh grey eyes wandering down the length of him, moving from his bruised arms to his inadvertently shaking legs, back up to his bleeding lip and wet eyes.

He raised himself again to his full height, pinning Link with his foot. A heavy heel jammed into his shoulder, over his mark, and he hissed in pain as Haema leaned in, crossing his arms over his thigh. Link lifted shaking hands to Haema's boot and tried to push the man's weight from his shoulder, but his fingers just slipped off the leather, and his arms couldn't muster the strength to push hard enough. His stomach turned inside him, but it was the only muscle with any life left in it—even his lungs and throat had given up their pained groaning. After all, there was no point; no amount of cries or pleas could deter Haema from doing as he wished.

The general twisted his heel into Link's shoulder, leaning into it. The cloth of his tattered shirt rubbed against his skin, burning with pressure. He tried in vain to squeeze out from under it, but only managed to hit his head against the stone floor, only managed to make Haema lean all the harder.

When the general was evidently satisfied he had Link pinned and compliant, he withdrew a little pressure and crossed his arms, eyes shining in the firelight. "You think you're clever, don't you?" he hissed. "You and that little Sheikah savage of yours."

Link drew in a quick breath at her mention. His heart struggled in his throat, his hands shook, but he managed to reach up and grip the decorated flap of Haema's boot. He opened his mouth, trying to push out the words, but they emerged nothing more than a pained hiss, meaningless and frail.

Haema just brushed Link off his boot and pushed a little harder with his heel. "I find it amusing you think you can come and go from my domain as you please," he growled. "Good thing word of the redead stableboy reached my ear as quickly as it did. Do you know who it was who betrayed you?"

Shaddon's name hovered over Link's lips, but he was either too weak or too prudent to say it.

"The good stableman Talon. He thought he saw a ghost. He made the mistake of expressing his concern to a captain, who happened to remember seeing you in our camp in the desert. Of course, they both have been amply rewarded for their loyal service. It's odd how fate works in one's favor, isn't it?" Haema drove his point home with a twist of his heel. "I hoped I'd never see you again. Slithering up to my King like the evil little snake you are, exploiting his mercy. You're not worthy to shovel his horse's shit, boy." He paused a moment, narrowing his eyes at Link's weak protests, watching his fingers uselessly scratch at his toes. "I can't believe this," he laughed to himself. "You. Of all people, _you._ " He shook his head. "I've never seen an insect more worthy of crushing. But His Highness wishes that you live, at least for now." Something of a grin, tainted with cruelty, passed over his features. His eyes shone and he leaned a little closer to Link, smile spreading. "Luckily he did not force my restraint in the case of your Sheikah friend. Do you know what I did to her?"

Link's stomach turned. A sudden impulse shook through him, tightening his muscles and forcing a bead of sweat down his cheek. He gripped either side of Haema's boot and twisted with the last of his strength. The general stumbled, throwing his arms out to catch himself, and with a grunt of pain and effort, Link pushed out from under him. He rolled to his aching side, hands groping the wall for purchase. If he could just pull himself to his feet—or even to his knees, he'd have a chance of reciprocating a strike. If he could land one blow, just one good punch on that self-satisfied grin—

But he couldn't. As he tried to tug himself to his feet, the general's foot met his ear. He felt something rip—his head spun, his ear rang, and a warm stream dripped down the side of his face, pooling around his collarbone as he collapsed back to the floor.

"Save your energy, boy, I haven't even told you yet," Haema laughed. He gave Link's stomach a hearty stomp just for good measure, and lingered over him as he curled on his side, trying to hold in whatever food remained inside him and deprive Haema of the satisfaction of seeing him vomit. "But seeing as you're deaf, I'll say it slowly and loudly. I had my executioner cut her lengthwise, like this." He indicated a line up Link's shaking leg, stopping at his hip. "I had him pull her muscle from her bone and throw it to the dogs. She, of course, watched." Haema shifted his weight to point to his other leg. "Then we did it with the other side. Not enough meat on the first one, you know—she was a lean little bitch. The hounds were still hungry even after that, so we moved on. We sliced down her arms, then her back, but the dogs wanted more, so we gutted her and let them have their fill." He smiled broadly at the incomprehensible sobs that came pouring, weak but in rapid succession, from Link's bleeding mouth. "She wasn't the most generous slab of meat, but she fed my animals well enough."

With a wave of misery, it happened. Link's stomach twisted so violently he had to throw back his head and hack up what little was left inside him. He shut his eyes, releasing a groan of misery too pathetic for even Haema to revel in. The general wrinkled his nose at the display and removed his foot, watching for any sign his prisoner had the will to stand up and resist him. When Link just lay on the ground, heaving, he turned and strode back to the cell door, where the torch-bearing guards waited for him.

"It should be considered a mercy she died as fast as she did. Her people certainly aren't known for expiring in a timely fashion." With a snort that may have been meant to resemble a laugh, the general left the cell. With him he took the last remnants of warmth and light from the torches, and when the guards closed the door behind him, Link found himself left alone with nothing but the insurmountable darkness and his own wounded breathing.

* * *

He did not know how long he lay on the floor of his cell. He did not count the meals that were thrown in front of him, and even if he bothered, it was equally likely they brought one every three days as three a day. His stomach was indifferent to the nourishment, his sense of time's passage had ground to a deathly halt. He did not want to eat, he didn't want to assuage the terrible thirst that parched his throat every hour of his lightless days. He did not want to continue breathing, to bend his agonized ribs to let in the stale air, he did not want to lift his head every time the door opened and a guard arrived in a rush of blinding torchlight, to deliver another meal or carry off the chamberpot.

But his body did not let him sink into nothingness—every time he closed his eyes, they opened again, despite his best intentions. He knew it was his own tortured thoughts of Impa that woke him each time he slept. Every time he imagined her, the way the knife must've cut through her, of what must've been rushing through her head when the last of her blood left her veins, a voice in the very recesses of his mind told him it couldn't be true. Link had seen the impossible many times, but this atrocity, Impa's ignoble death at the hands of one of Haema's nameless torturers, could not have happened. It simply couldn't have.

None of the hounds Link had trained at the palace had ever been fed such horrid fare, and he knew (or hoped), they had not developed a taste for it in his absence. Nor would the King's men kill a prisoner so soon after they caught her, if she had information to give. Besides, he was sure if Impa had left this world, especially under such grisly circumstances, he would've felt it. He knew, he just knew he would've felt it.

But he had felt nothing the moment of the yellow-haired girl's death. He had felt nothing the moment of Ahnadib's. He did not have the sensitivity a deadseer might, he was not a man who could simply _feel_ the end of another. He knew he couldn't rely on the hope that Impa had to be alive simply because he hadn't supernaturally felt her die.

As the hours dragged on, each wave of optimism was succeeded by another wave of despair; each time he convinced himself to hold onto hope, the next moment he would readily release it. He had no recourse, he had no charm of courage to help him through his mind's despicable wanderings, he had nothing to do but nurse his wounds and masochistically bargain with himself. If only he'd run when he'd seen Talon. If only he hadn't spoken to the man, hadn't looked him in the eye and given him enough time to recognize him. If only he'd waited a few more minutes to walk down that street, he wouldn't have run into him at all.

 _If only_. There was little comfort in speculation. He could sit here and lick his wounds and conjecture all he wanted, until he was wrinkled and grey. He could tell himself a thousand stories about Zelda and Gwen, about Shaddon's guilt or innocence, about his own death and Impa's. He could imagine Palo bursting through the door, knife in one hand, the other outstretched to him. He could imagine Nabru doing the same, lifting the metal off its hinges with one shaking groan of her ample musculature. He could imagine Impa herself leading him once again to freedom, hand around his, but it would do him no good.

He was utterly without knowledge, without hope, without options and without any chance of escape, excluding, of course, successful self-destruction.

He thought about it. Over and over, with all the time in the world to consider the possibilities. Between meals, between painful trips to the chamberpot in the corner, he thought deeply about how hard he could hit his head on the floor of the cell, if he could remove his trousers and tighten a leg sufficiently around his neck to choke the life from him, if he could manage to cut himself on the edge of some outcropping of rock on the cell's wall and bleed out before a guard could stop him. He wondered if he could somehow choke himself on the slop they threw in front of him, unaccompanied by cutlery, or if he could just simply lie down and will himself to stop breathing.

But he couldn't. He just waited in the freezing darkness, day after day (or for each hour of this one endless, dark day) for the guards to come, for his meals, for any semblance of a break in his miserable, empty routine of self-blame, mourning, bargaining, and elevating his own hopes only to dash them again.

Relief came in the form of two armored guards. Link had no way to tell the time when they came to him, silent and bearing a jingling set of fetters between them. He hadn't the strength to resist them when they pulled him to his feet, twisted his arms behind him and snapped the metal to his wrists. He could only thank them silently for not bringing Haema with them, for finally leading him out of the darkness of his cell and into the torchlight of the hall.

One of the guards slipped a burlap bag over his head and tightened it about his neck. He squinted to see what he could between the fibers of fabric, but a larger shadow fell over him when the guard threw a blanket of black wool across his head and shoulders. Thoroughly blinded and sufficiently bound, he started his journey upward.

The guards dragged him down the hall, roughly redirecting him when he stumbled the wrong way. They made no sound except for a few dissatisfied grunts when Link tripped over himself, or when the wool they'd thrown over him started to slide off. They stopped several times to readjust the cloth, or to let Link, hurt and weak as he was, catch his breath before leading him through increasingly warmer halls and up winding stairs. Link figured he was a pathetic sight, a blind, stumbling figure cloaked like some sort of black ghost, but he could not tell what others passing by might think of him.

But he knew there were others that passed him. He could hear their footsteps, hear their quick intake of breath as they made way for the duo of guards and their staggering prisoner. The stone beneath the thin soles of his shoes had turned to carpet a few staircases back—and tiny wisps of cooking smoke met his nose every hundred or so steps. As the soldiers dragged him down hallways and around curving corners, he lost all doubt about his location. The air was warm around him, thickened with the heat of stoves and well-stoked fires. The sweet smells were no doubt the result of the palace cooks, or of the floral arrangements lining the halls, the sounds around him none other than the shock of dignified servants finding themselves suddenly in the presence of a criminal so heinous he could not even be brought out of the dungeon without a tarp over him.

He knew where they were taking him, but even with that knowledge, his hands still shook, his breath wheezed with anxiety, his stomach turned. He knew he should have accepted the inevitability of his situation when they finally ripped the coverings from his face, when they shoved him to his knees and pushed his forehead into the ground in front of him. But still, he could not stop his heart from dropping deep into his stomach when he raised his eyes and saw he had been brought, not for the first time in his life, before the King.


	51. Dream-Magic

"The Rova knows no right, she knows no wrong.  
She knows how the spokes of the world's wheel turn,  
She knows the weakness of the human heart,  
She knows the course of rivers and the stars in the sky.  
She knows many things, but feels nothing.  
And this is why she must be avoided at any cost."

Ghadib ahn-Molgud, _The Creed of Molgera_ , Canto 7

* * *

Ganondorf looked a true King, adorned in gold and black and reclining on an ornate chaise, one ankle crossed over his opposite knee. On his forehead his omnipresent jewel glinted, and his wide mouth spread elegantly in a half-smile. He stroked his beard, eyes shining with something that resembled amusement. Behind him, standing tall over the back of his chair, loomed his wife. Long red hair fell over one shoulder, and she glowed like the sun, firelight reflecting in the infinite gems and metals that adorned her. Link could not bring himself to look directly at her—partly because of her garish ornamentation, and partly because his last encounters with her taught him merely staring at her could cause him physical pain.

So he quickly averted his eyes from the King and his wife, instead taking in his surroundings. The room around him resembled something of a lounge; a few small but elegant tables, opulent chairs, a roaring fire. At its far end, between gilded black pillars, windows stretched up to the high ceiling, decorated in stained glass. On their outer sills piled the winter's collection of heavy snow. Link could tell the sun had set only moments ago—the tainted light reflected in factory smoke lit the windows a brownish gold, and the brightest source of light in the ornate room was the healthy fire.

It was what sat in front of it that caught his full attention. Curled tightly before the flames, bright yellow eyes blinking over a black nose, a little sand fox watched him carefully. Link narrowed his eyes at the creature as recognition dawned on him. He could make out every glint in its golden eyes, every vein in its sail-like ears, backlit a morbid pink by the bright fire.

The creature did not seem surprised to see Link again in its presence. It yawned, showing off its numerous, sharp white teeth before resting its little head back down between its paws like a faithful dog. It closed its big eyes and heaved a comfortable sigh.

Evidently the King's wife was pleased with his interest in the animal. "Any good witch must have a familiar," she said. Her voice was heavily accented with the music of the desert, and forced a terrified shiver up his spine. "Do you recognize him?"

Link said nothing. He did not take his eyes off the resting creature. He just shifted his arms behind him, hoping in vain that alleviating some of his physical discomfort might also help with the mental unease.

"Answer her," the King said. "I know you can hear her."

Link's eyes did not leave the floor. His heart already hurt with every beat, fluttering against his ribcage. He opened his mouth to answer, but no sound emerged.

"Speak up," the King commanded. The curt irritation in his voice forced Link's fists to clench behind his back.

"Y…yes." He pushed the air out of him as forcefully as a shout, but all that came from him was a dry, raspy squeak of a word, barely intelligible.

The witch must've moved—Link could hear the slight clinking of her jewelry. "Of course you do. He was the one who led you to me the first time we met."

Link dared to look at the two of them, but kept his eyes on the King. Ganondorf's gaze darted up to his wife, but a brief wrinkle of his thick eyebrows was the only query he gave her. He seemed nothing but charmed with her statement, as if introducing two friends and discovering they had already known one another.

"You… knew…" Link croaked. He could not articulate his thoughts, he could not walk her through the memories he retained of a kindly sand fox, who had led him into the Colossus and distracted the King's magicians just in time to save him from discovery. He had thanked the little animal, thoroughly convinced it was wholly (but perhaps inadvertently) on his side. But now, here it was, lingering before the witch's fire, bushy tail flicking in contentment.

"She knows many things," Ganondorf said. "More than you'd think possible."

"Why…" Link started, directing the question at the fearsome woman but still unable to meet her gaze.

She seemed to understand his meaning. "He brought you to me because I wanted to meet you. I wanted to meet both of you." Her words seemed empty, rehearsed, devoid of emotion. "When my eyes in this world revealed to me I had visitors for the first time in a century, how could I not welcome them inside? Especially such good-looking gentlemen." Her laugh struck Link's heart like a blow, and he had to lower his head as a dull pain pulsated from his chest to his limbs.

"Ah, so you did follow me there after all," the King said, folding his hands and laying his chin across them. "I suppose that explains who killed my men outside the Colossus. Though I must admit I wouldn't have guessed you had some skill with a blade. When Haema told me you put up a fight in Obra Garud, I was as surprised as he was." The King wore a discomfiting smile. Link could not pick apart the emotions in it—to him it was equally likely to be smile of pride as it was a grin of loathing. "But it looks like dear Haema has exacted his revenge. He must've given you a stern talking-to." Link did not know how many marks Haema had left on him as proof of retribution. He looked over himself, briefly—at his ripped, bloodstained shirt, at the way his legs shook slightly just from the effort of kneeling, and knew whatever bruises or lacerations remained on him were more than enough to tell the King all about the nature of the general's visit.

The King shook his head, never losing his complacent half-smile. "That man. He has an implacable sense of justice. What did you tell him?"

Link's eyes widened. He hadn't said a word to him.

Ganondorf laughed at his look. "He didn't question you? That is very much like him. He dispenses the punishment before the inquisition. Very well then, I suppose that duty now passes to me." The King leaned forward, intertwining his thick, decorated fingers. The shape of his wife shifted a little as she seated herself behind him—Link could only see the sway of her glowing robes, the glint of her jewels. "Tell me everything. Tell me why you followed me to the desert. Tell me why you came back to my city."

Link bit his lip, lowering his eyes to the polished marble floor in front of him, dancing orange and yellow from the flickering fire. He said nothing.

"Although I do enjoy these sorts of puzzles, I'm afraid I don't have the time or energy to resort to conjecture. I am a very busy man." The King narrowed his eyes, but with more bemusement than malice. He stared at him a while, expectant, silent. When Link did not speak up, he shook his head and sighed. "Then we will have to resort to questioning your friend. Although the Sheikah do have a well-earned reputation for being hard to break."

Link's ears perked up and he raised his head. Images came and faded rapidly in his mind: Impa, flayed and bloodstained, the hungry mouths of the palace hounds, the smile Haema wore as he delineated the details of her death. His heart skipped a beat, renewed with cautious hope.

Ganondorf smiled. "Have I caught your interest? If you tell us everything now, we will not have to resort to hurting her. I am a reasonable man, you know this. I abhor cruelty."

Link's gut twisted around itself. If Impa was still alive and he still had something to lose, he'd have to conduct himself carefully. Either Haema or the King could be lying to him. Or both.

Link rolled his head on his shoulders, stretching the aching muscles in his neck, brow furrowing in thought. When he spoke, his voice seemed to creak like old wood, and he swayed weakly on his knees. "Snapping the necks of little girls isn't cruel?"

The King frowned, taken aback. He seemed to lose himself in thought for a moment, but eventually clicked his tongue, nodding slowly. It seemed a chore for him to recall the particular incident to which Link referred—perhaps it was such a mundane occurrence it passed through his memory as the details of breakfast might for some other, lesser man. "Her death still haunts you? Hm… Clearly you have retained some recollection of the events of that night, so you will no doubt remember what I told her before I killed her. It was necessary. Everything I do, I do because it is _necessary_." He leaned back, eyeing Link from the height of the certainty of his own words. "I do it because there is no other recourse. Surely you remember even a little of what I told you all those nights in the desert. You must remember what I showed you, what I said to you about this fractured land, about that golden curse of the heartless gods."

Link's head filled with a single image of an ethereal triangle, floating elegantly above the King's palm. It was the same menacing power that had enticed the yellow-haired girl, that forced him to his knees in fright, that collapsed and built nations, that designated the divine right to the throne of Hyrule, but that was the extent of his knowledge of it. He couldn't guess its origin, or purpose, or what in the world it had to do with him.

The King did not seem concerned with Link's eternally confused stare. "Haema seems to think you share in that curse. But you are a mysterious child. I'm still unsure whether you are worth my mercy, worth all this time and effort. Barudi."

His wife rose beside him, robes rippling with firelight. "Yes, my King."

"Take a good look at him. Tell me if I should throw him out and forget about him. I'd rather not have to worry about this particular thorn in my side."

"Of course."

Link's heart shrank at her mere approach. Her golden shoes clicked across the marble, and with each step he found himself squirming a little more desperately. He did not tell his muscles to writhe at her advance—he did not want to give her the satisfaction of seeing him so afflicted—but every fiber in him told him to run from her, and if he could not run, crawl.

But he was weak, shackled firmly, and had nowhere to go. When she knelt before him, he turned his head, looking anywhere, at anything, but her. The fox by the fire perked up, big ears rising, tail flicking. He found he could not quite look at the animal either, so he tilted his head toward the fire and decided it was probably the safest thing in the room for him to stare at.

When he felt Barudi's breath on his cheek, a disturbed shiver ran through him. "He's such a _little_ thing, isn't he?" she said. She lifted her hand to his shoulder and tugged at his ripped shirt, pulling the fabric away to reveal his heavily bruised mark. "And he already belongs to you. Strictly speaking. It is an old rune, but a good start." When she pressed her nail into his brand, he could not tell if the pain that spread from his shoulder was searing hot or ice cold. "Such pretty eyes, too. Look at me." Link clenched his jaw and watched the flames dance in the fireplace. "I know you can. You have done it before."

Ganondorf shifted on his seat. "Obey your Queen."

It was not so much because of the insistence of the King, but the force of inevitability, that made Link finally raise his eyes to hers. He knew what to expect; he had experienced it before, but he could not help but grind his teeth the moment their stares met. His heart froze in his chest, his blood ran cold through his veins, pain spread from his torso up to his head, through his limbs, to the ends of his shaking fingers and his blood-caked ears. He could not breathe; he could barely see. He lost himself in her terrible golden irises, in the bottomless black pupils. His mouth hung open, his every muscle ached, but he found himself unable to look away.

She waved her hand and he flinched. He couldn't guess what kind of spell or curse she was weaving over him, if it would break his bones, tear the breath from his lungs, or devour him slowly. Irrational terror rebounded in every corner of his mind, until he felt a snap behind him. Something clattered to the ground by his feet. His arms fell to his sides, now free from fetters, but he found he couldn't raise them to push the witch away, couldn't do anything to stop the icy pain radiating from his heart.

"Show me your hands."

Her voice seemed a contradiction. It broke the silence in his agonized head, grating yet mellifluous, distant yet far too close. It was a musical command, like a forceful tune Impa might play on her lyre, and he couldn't disobey it. He lifted his hands and placed them in her open palms. A dreadful cold stung him where his skin met hers, but he let her look over his hands, tracing the creases in them with one long fingernail. She absorbed herself in the intricacies of his shaking palms for a long few minutes, humming and muttering to herself in the deep tones of her language. When she finally dropped his hands, they fell limply at his sides, and she tilted his head at him for a moment.

"He bears the marks of magic. A few curses in his past, perhaps a few blessings." She turned his left hand over and examined it. "And his hand shows promise."

"I did not see much in it, I must admit," Ganondorf said. "Though I am no chiromancer."

"Do not distrust yourself, my King," Barudi muttered. "You were right to heed your own suspicions and those of your general. But I will have to probe further." The jewelry on her wrists jingled as she raised her index finger.

"Very well. Try not to destroy him." The King's voice seemed farther away each second.

"Of course, my love." She hovered one long, gold nail between Link's eyes, right above the deep wrinkle of distress. The finger was only a blur—her eyes still held his full unwilling attention, both burning through him like fire and freezing him in place. "This will be unpleasant," she said. He could tell by the way she smiled slightly, the way her lips parted to show just a hint of a wicked tongue, that she would find it enjoyable enough.

With a quick, almost viper-like motion, she dug her nail into his forehead. His eyes rolled back, darkness overtook his vision, and he let out one last desperate breath before he collapsed.

* * *

It was not at all unpleasant.

It was soundless. Lightless, limitless.

Painless.

For the first time in a long while, Link could feel nothing. He knew that somewhere far from him, a fire blazed, and a little farther, heavy flakes of late winter fell on a sleeping city. He knew that somewhere near his body (from which he was now fully disconnected), a sand fox twitched in the first pleasant chase of sleep. He knew that deep in the desert, the creature's ancestral home, a worm-goddess turned with certainty of her own prowess, and high in the cloudy tip of a familiar mountain, an intangible wolf-spirit kept his dreams safe in a flurry of glacial wind. He knew that in some distant future and some infinite past, somewhere boundlessly far from him, a baby girl slept in her mother's arms, rocking in a wagon across the fields of Lanayru. He knew many things, but knowing was all he could do. He heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. Nothing except the eternal gratitude for this moment of peace, this silent, comfortable solitude.

He did not know how long he slept in the sweet safety of numbness. There was a surety in the motionlessness, a peace in the silence, a sense that he did not have to hold onto anything because there was nothing for him to hold. He had nothing, he was nothing—he had not left the world because there was no world to leave, there was no _him_ that could leave.

He had never been aware of his own self sleeping. Each night was a blink, each morning not a renewal but a continuation. He did not dream—he knew he _had_ dreamt, before his ascent of Mount Eldin, but he could not recall the feeling of unconscious sight, the airy emotions of a dream as it fled the waking mind. He could not remember any of them, and it did not trouble him. He just fell into the silence of his head like it was a pool of steam, like it was the beckoning water of the hot springs above Kakariko.

When he opened his eyes, he did so with the purposefulness of a well-rested man. He did not move, he just lay on his side, arms and legs splayed comfortably. The stone under his cheek was warm, the air still. The marble shone with the light of the fire, and on it stood a pair golden shoes. Link kept his eyes locked on the pointed toes; he knew if he glanced up at the woman who wore them, he'd lose this moment. Whatever numbness she had granted him, he wanted nothing more than to hold onto it.

So he just lay in silence as she circled him, feet clicking on the white stone. He could feel her eyes on him, leaving a trail of goosebumps on his skin. He told himself to ignore her, to clutch at this rapidly fading feeling of emptiness while he still could. He focused on the warm stone beneath him and lay motionless, utterly unable to make a sound or mouth a word. The fox woke by the fire, lifted its white head and twitched its ears. It wrinkled its nose and stood, circling its little spot and clawing the stone as if making a burrow of sand.

"Fascinating." Link warded off the shiver Barudi's voice sent through him. "The boy has no dreams."

The King shifted slightly. "None?"

"Not one. Forgive me, but I can learn nothing from his sleep."

Ganondorf stood. "It is quite all right, my Queen."

Link's watched their feet shifting in the firelight. With each second, more awareness returned to him, and with it came the dull ache of his injuries, the harrowing uncertainty of his own future.

"There is one thing left we can do," Barudi said. "But I will need some time to prepare."

"How much time?"

"However long it takes for me to procure the heart of a newborn foal, a maiden's first blood, the tongue of a young widower and twelve inches of golden thread."

"Very well." The King called two names, voice ringing so loud Link started from his place on the floor. With the movement, his body returned to him, the sting of his wounds, the ache of his exhaustion, the hunger in his stomach and the dry cracking of his parched lips.

When two guards entered and pulled him from the floor, he groaned with renewed awareness of himself. Barudi's spell, whatever it had been, had faded; his moment of peace was gone.

The soldiers adjusted Link between them and heaved him toward the door. They wrestled with his arms, reintroducing the fetters to his wrists. Too weak to fight, voice still paralyzed in his throat, he let them grip his shoulders and haul him out the door. The King watched them practically carry him into the hall, gracing him with a thin smile.

"Farewell, odd child," he said. "Keep well. At least until we meet again."

* * *

 _Impa must not have liked him very much if she wanted him to look like an idiot_.

Palo smiled and shook his head. He lounged in the shadows of a bustling café, trying his best to ignore a giggling group of teenaged girls daring one another to approach him. He suspected if they had half an ounce of intelligence between them, they could figure out he could already hear them. He was, after all, a Sheikah currently in the act of spying.

The inadequately bundled man sat in the shadows of the Old Riko Playhouse, _Ordish Children's Stories_ open before him. Every once in a while he'd lower the book and look around him expectantly before burying himself again in its tales. Palo found it charming that every few minutes he furrowed his brow as his eyes darted across the page, as if he were fully, truly engaged in the moralistic fables of gallant knights and talking animals. Palo had read the book once, when he was a child, and had thoroughly disliked it. Maybe his opinion of it was half-formed by the culture around him; the author had set out to tell stories of every province, every ethnicity of the land, and depicted none but Hylians in a remotely favorable light. Palo had stopped reading when he got to the tale of a lustful Sheikah kidnapping the betrothed of an Ordish knight, after which the wronged man rampaged through the mountains, killing all in his path to rescue her and preserve her maidenhood. Palo didn't think he'd been a particularly sensitive child, but that was too soon after the Eldin War for him to stomach it. The corpses of his people were not quite cold enough yet.

But this man seemed engrossed in the book, only tearing himself away when presumably he remembered he was supposed to be on the lookout for someone. Occasionally he removed his glasses and wiped condensation from them before replacing them on his reddened nose. Old Riko was still in the throes of winter, and it was not a pleasant day to sit and read outside. He would have to endure the cloudless chill a while yet—but that's all he deserved for showing up late.

Talm had gotten bored, as she was wont to do, shortly after high noon. It did not take her long to grip her mother's arm and pull her toward the Playhouse, promising a matinee. Poor Irma tried her best not to appear tempted by the prospect of warm ale and musical entertainment, insisting waiting was more important, but Palo nudged them both toward the Playhouse. The small city seemed to revive Talm and her mother in a way he, or few other Sheikah, could understand. To him and the others, it was at best a place to resupply, at worst a reminder of everything the Ordish, among others, had taken from them, before, during, and after the Eldin War. But to Talm and Irma, it was a place of wonderment, of excitement and pleasant experiences. He could not fault them for that outlook—it was at least more productive than his own habit of lingering on the bloodied history of the place. Though he had an excuse to, since each time he blinked he could see the ghostly echoes of what had happened to the city over decades of bloodshed.

It had been nearly an hour after the midday striking of the town's clocktower that Palo finally spied a bespectacled, ragged-looking man with a book under his arm. That was only after he'd returned to his hiding spot; he'd taken the time to go negotiate some firegrass from Temon, nimbly avoiding the subject of exactly how much money he owed him. The old man, though perpetually ill-tempered, was in a forgiving mood, and accepted all of Palo's money without comment, handing him two sealed jars of dried firegrass worth much less than what he'd offered.

He had smoked some behind the man's barn, but since he'd forfeited every gold piece he had, he'd found himself unable to satisfy his subsequent hunger. He'd have to wait for Talm or Irma to reemerge from their matinee. Or he could try wrestling some money from the man in front of him, now deeply engrossed in his children's book. According to Impa's letter, he would sit there until sunset, and if he had not been approached by then, come back the next day.

Palo wondered how many days the man had sat in the cold shadows of the Playhouse. Probably not too many—although the elder hadn't received a letter from Impa since before she'd left the Capital, Palo knew how long it took to get a carriage all the way from the city to Old Riko. She might be somewhere nearby, in the town or just outside it. He imagined all the things that could've delayed her; mostly they came in the form of Link—spraining his ankle or getting distracted by some creature or another, insisting she stop and teach him what she knew about this plant or that type of carriage, falling into the River Hylia or getting kidnapped by a passing group of Gerudo soldiers straight from the pages of _Ordish Children's Stories_ , hungry for a pretty boy like him. In any case, Impa would no doubt rescue him and they would both arrive in Old Riko within a few days at the latest.

Another half hour passed. The simpering group of teenagers had left the proximity of the cafe; in the end, none of them had mustered the courage to approach him, to his relief. A few clouds passed overhead, and the man in front of the Playhouse shivered. He set his book down, rubbed his hands together and surveyed the square, eyes following the well-dressed passersby.

A figure wearing a thick wool shawl and long skirt separated herself from the crowd and stopped before him. He smiled and reached up, pulling something heavy from her arms. Palo watched folds of cloth fall away from the bundle, and a little blonde head poked out. The baby lifted its eyes to its father, wiggling in his arms as he lay it on his knee.

"Gods…" Palo couldn't help the breathy laugh. "She did it. She really did it."

He was well hidden behind the tinted windows of the restaurant and even more so in his black robe, but he was close enough to see the little girl's big blue eyes widening at her surroundings. Even from this distance, and even with the unformed roundness of infancy, Palo could make out the beginnings of a dignified, noble face.

He watched the family for a while, transfixed. The mother kept adjusting her coat nervously and running her fingers through her shining black hair. The father just bounced his daughter on his knee and held the book in front of him. Palo saw his mouth move, but from this distance he could not read his lips. Palo figured he should've shown his daughter something better-written, something a little less tainted with the racialism of Ordona, but the way her eyes widened, the way her cheeks flushed as her smile spread, cleared the resentment from Palo's head. Evidently hearing her father's voice was enough enjoyment for her.

Five minutes before Talm and Irma were due to emerge from the Playhouse, and about fifteen after Palo had lost his comfortable high, he exited the cafe and approached the family. His hands deep in the pockets of his cloak, he crossed the sunny square, avoiding patches of melting snow, and stopped deliberately in front of the decorated bench.

The man looked up from his daughter, eyes narrowing behind his fogging glasses. "Who are you?" he asked.

Palo removed his hood, revealing his face and the tattoos that adorned it.

"Ah." The man handed his daughter to his wide-eyed wife, and stood to shake Palo's hand. "I'm Shaddon Stockwell." Palo took the hand reluctantly in his glove, unused to the gesture. It had always struck him as too formal—plus, you never knew where a man's hand had been. "Are you the one who's going to lead us to Kakariko?"

"Me, and some others," he answered. He glanced to the woman and child, eyes lingering on the infant's face for a moment. "Where's Impa?" he asked.

"Who?" Shaddon's brow furrowed and a wide frown spread from one poorly-shaven cheek to the other.

"About this tall, red eyes, always has a scrawny Hylian following her around."

"Oh, you must mean Doctor Borville. He—she said she'd catch up to us. I think her friend is with her."

A creak sounded beside them. The doors to the Playhouse opened with a wave of light and heat, and theatergoers poured from the building. Talm and Irma were among them, talking earnestly about the show, the wine, and how simply _dreadful_ that aria had been. They stopped at the bench almost absentmindedly, as if Palo and their mission to escort the royal family up the slope of Eldin were trivial compared to the performance of that season's newest soprano.

"Who are these people?" Shaddon asked. He seemed nervous—as any man would be when the crowd scrutinizing him and his family grew bigger.

"This is Irma, and her daughter, Talm. They're here to help you up the mountain." He did not mention that they were specifically chosen as guides because of their shared Hylian culture. _This is Irma, your ethnic cushion. And her half-breed spawn, just to get you a little nervous about miscegenation._

The brief surprise at the new introduction passed over Shaddon quickly; soon he was offering his hand to them, offering his child to Irma's doting, outstretched arms.

"She's beautiful," Irma cooed, rocking the curious girl. "So big and healthy, too."

 _Just pudgy enough to make a good stew._ Palo stopped himself there—of course Irma wouldn't make a soup from the scion of the royal family. Not yet, at least. She was smart enough to know you had to fatten something up before you ate it.

"So, where's my sister?" Talm asked Palo. She had refused her mother's attempts to get her to hold the baby.

"Not here. She told them she'd catch up." He removed the pack he'd been holding for Talm and handed it to her. "Can you make it up the mountain with those three?" He nodded to the family—Shaddon had laughed at something Irma had said, and even his silent wife had cracked a shy smile. He was suddenly glad they had brought the woman down with them.

"Yeah. We should be all right." Talm hoisted the near-empty pack onto her back. Whatever possessions the family brought with them would have to fit inside. Otherwise, their belongings stayed in town, either discarded, or (as Palo let himself hope) if it was worth something, bestowed to Temon to alleviate his debt.

"I'll stay here and wait for Impa. Could be a few days."

"All right then."

Before she could turn and go, he gripped her elbow. "But I need some money."

She shook her head, but reached into her pocket for a few coins. "Don't spend it all on firegrass."

"Already have. That's the problem." He lifted his cloak to reveal his bag, glass jars shining from under its flap.

"I should've guessed." She simpered, adjusted the pack on her shoulders, and stepped toward the laughing family. Palo could see a spring in her step, and could not stop her optimism from outshining even his worry at Impa's absence.

They had done it. The last blood of the royal family was here, under their protection. She was young and healthy, ready to sprout into the queen her country needed, to usurp her usurper and reclaim the blessing of the gods that had run through her blood for centuries. She was going to grow up fast, grow up strong and wise, grow up to inherit the chaotic shards of a fractured country and the onerous task of piecing it back together.

Palo almost felt sorry for the kid.


	52. The Needle

AN: The following scene(s) contain depictions of torture

* * *

"The oldest magic of the Gerudo people, the magic of blood and moon, was once a defining feature of Rova culture. Long ago, it was not hard to find a wandering woman of the wastes well-versed in the practices of sacrifice and witchcraft, but many of these spells and traditions died out in the years following the Conquest War. Most Gerudo will say it was for the best."

Lady Ronia of the House of Faron, _The Historical Atlas of the Peoples of Hyrule_

* * *

Whether he closed his eyes or kept them open, it made no difference. Images of Impa hovered in his vision, or what little was left of it after all light had been stolen from him. With each breath of hope rising in his chest that she might be alive, she appeared in front of him, bending over the strings of her lyre or staring thoughtfully at her folded brown hands. With each wave of despair at the certainty of her death, she disappeared, back into the stone walls, back into whatever place Palo ventured when his tattoos glowed an eerie red. One hour she would hover over him, stroking his hair from his forehead and assuaging his doubts, another she would writhe in blood, half-flayed, mouth open in a scream drowned out by the starving howls of dogs.

Perhaps that was what they wanted. They wanted him to torture himself with doubt, they wanted him to roll from side to painful side, sleepless in darkness, thinking about her. Why else would Haema lie to him? Why else would the King?

He did not know if the images were an aftereffect of Barudi's sleeping spell, or if he had finally driven himself mad, but through the haze of his own confusion, he took hope in having two certainties, two viable options, left to him.

If he discovered Impa was dead, he would kill himself. It wasn't a difficult or surprising conclusion; if the King and his witch wanted him alive, obviously he should consider dying. If Impa were no longer in this world, if she were no longer within arm's reach, if she would never pluck a string or sing a Sheikah hymn again, he would leave too.

If she was alive, he would stay. He would plot, he would endure, he would repay her for rescuing him from the King's dungeon so long ago. He owed her that much.

But until then he had to contend with the terrifying possibility that he may never find out. Worse than the discomfort of freezing stone, worse than the tired pangs of hunger in his stomach, worse than the interrogations and whippings, was the lingering pain of his ignorance. He had no clues, no reason to believe one thing over another, no reliable sources of information. He had not seen the King in gods knew how long, and when Haema visited him, it wasn't Link who did the questioning.

Perhaps the general was spurred to play at interrogator because his King had expressed disappointment he had not done so already. Perhaps it was because Barudi had failed to wrestle anything useful from his absent dreams. Perhaps it was just because the man enjoyed it. The latter, at least, was certain; questioning a prisoner was doubtlessly beneath a general's station, but every once in a while, just when Link would hope his lashes and bruises might heal uninterrupted, Haema would appear with a delighted grin at his door, ghoulish torturer lingering at his side like a hairless, bloodthirsty dog.

The first time that pale wight (Grog, Haema called him, though Link wasn't sure if that was his real name or some sort of eldritch title) pulled a bag over his head and hauled him from his cell, he wondered if the man had been responsible for Impa's death. As he was dragged blindly down the hall, he couldn't stop himself from shouting questions, naive enough to believe the torturer might answer. All he got for a reply was Haema's broad laugh and a fist to the face through the burlap.

Grog's "ballroom," as Haema called it, was almost as big as its eponym, its edges and corners decorated with machines and pulleys and racks (none of which, Haema assured him, would be used on him, as per the King's orders). It appeared they would have to take a less mechanized approach to interrogation.

Well before the first lash fell and Link learned the rules of this particular game, he had tried to squeeze information from the general. As Grog secured his hands above him, he had turned on his chain, toes probing the ground for purchase. "You're a liar, Haema." The sinewy ghoul delivered a quick punch to his gut, but he pushed through. "You—lied—about—her."

The general was nothing but intrigued. "Lied about who?"

"Impa. He told me… she was still alive," Link wheezed. His eyes met Haema's grey, cold stare, and he tightened his fists above him.

"Who told you?"

"Ganon—"

Link could not push out the final syllable before Haema's foot met his side. He coughed, jerking on his dangling chain as the general circled him.

"You aren't fit to spew his name," he hissed, but Link persisted.

"You wouldn't make… a liar… of your King."

To Link's surprise, and a little to his horror, Haema let out an angry laugh. "You think you're clever, don't you? My King's word is law, his word is truth. Distorting it will not change that. Slandering his honest name will not change that." He retreated from Link and folded his hands behind his back. "Grog, what's the proper punishment for lèse-majesté?" The grinning man opened his lipless mouth and revealed a severed stub for a tongue. "Fortunately for you," Haema continued. "You'll keep yours for now. You're going to need it."

At first, Link tried to prove him wrong. Even if he'd wanted to talk, the shock of the initial strikes left him breathless, speechless. But when the novelty wore off, when he could breathe again, the pain came in waves. Sometimes he felt only cold, numb strangeness as his skin prickled from the lashes, almost like he was submerged in freezing water (he recalled with uncanny vividness the day Impa had taught him to swim). In those moments, when he felt only cold, he told himself he could endure in silence. Other times his back stung so much he could not stop himself from writhing and wiggling, pulling at the chain above him ("We have ourselves a dancer, Grog," Haema chuckled).

The first time Link begged for it to stop, Haema was delighted. After letting Grog exercise his arm a few more times, he approached, smiling. It was only then that Haema started to ask questions. And Link started to lie to him.

He wasn't sure what he'd tell the general at first; all he knew is he could not mention Zelda. So when Haema asked him what he was doing in the city, Link fed him a believable reason enough: he was there to kill the King.

"And then what?"

When Link hesitated, Haema motioned to Grog. Link spent the next few lashes thinking frantically about what he would say. Quickly, he settled on one believable but half-hearted fiction, and told himself to repeat it. "And then… crown… Ordishwoman."

Haema stopped Grog as he raised his whip. "Ordishwoman?"

Link took a breath, knowing the permanency of committing to the story. Impa had once told him that the best way to lie convincingly was to repeat it enough that even the liar believes the truth of it. So he told Haema. Again and again, with each subsequent visit to the ballroom, he told Haema about the plans to overthrow the King and replace him with an Ordishwoman of noble descent, related by some convoluted bloodline to the old royal family. Link hadn't yet been told the woman's name, house, or even her location. Only the elder in Kakariko knew such details.

This seemed to satisfy Haema, to a point. The general entertained himself with trying to catch falsities in Link's story, asking him the same questions each time he visited, each time Grog dragged him from his cell and painted a few more stripes on his back. But when Link started repeating himself, giving the same answers consistently and readily, Haema got bored. He began to lace his genuine inquiries with obscure historical trivia, signaling to Grog with a great degree of delight whenever Link failed to answer which patriarch founded which Ordish house, which battle was won on what month of whose reign, who authored what interprovincial treaty.

It did not take Link long to realize the general would've happily played that game forever. He had an infinite trove of historical knowledge; the questions would continue for hours and he never asked the same one twice. Link had no reason to retain the answers, and too little knowledge to guess accurately. So after Grog strung him up and the lesson started, he steeled himself for the strikes and began to answer every question, unequivocally, with the name "Impa."

It was only then that Haema lost interest in him. Perhaps the fire of the inquisition had lost its spark when Link no longer had any desire to participate, or perhaps the general found himself busier with more important things to do than play cruel schoolmaster to a worthless prisoner.

So Link was left undisturbed in his cell. Though his back still stung and sometimes the dry skin would crack and bleed, he could hardly bring himself to care. He sat alone in the dark, summoning and banishing images of Impa as his fevered mind dictated. He started to count his meals, but he didn't know what they meant in terms of hours or days. It was even hard for him to gauge the passage of time by the slow healing of his wounds—without care, without warmth and without proper nourishment, his cuts and bruises lingered, his aches persisted, his torn ear still throbbed when he moved his head. There was no way for him to tell exactly how long he had been down there when the King came to his cell.

The rattling of the metal door dispelled a particularly endearing image of Impa oversleeping (a rare and enchanting sight), flooding the room with orange torchlight and evaporating her body into the stale air. Link lifted his head, squinting, hoping as he always did when his door opened that it was anyone other than Haema.

The King's strong presence preceded him; the scent of fire and musk, the mere aura of power that radiated from him rendered the act of even looking at him obsolete. Regardless, Link pulled himself from his position on the floor, scooting against the back wall, making space for the towering presence of Hyrule's monarch.

One of the guards that accompanied the King placed a torch against the wall, the other produced a small chair, setting it behind his ruler and retreating, head lowered, back into the hall. His companion followed him out, closing the door behind him as Ganondorf seated himself.

They stared at one another in silence for half a lifetime. Finally, eyes lit by the flickering torch, the King folded his hands and leaned forward. "Well?"

Link said nothing.

"Are you not going to regale me with your story?" the King asked. In his toothy smile shone a hint of roguish amusement.

Link just sank his head between his knees.

"Haema told me you have said some very interesting things. About my assassination. About my Ordish supplanter."

With a twist of the stomach, Link considered the possibility that the King was here because he wanted to replace Haema as inquisitor. But he brought nothing in the cell with him besides the almost comically small chair, and he didn't seem too eager to beat Link with it. "It's… all true," Link said.

"I've no doubt there are a few pools of royal blood still to be found in the far reaches of my land. The old Hyrulean kings were fond of making bastards, or so I've heard. I just find it hard to believe there were only two of you sent here to clear the way for such a bastard to take my throne. Surely there must be some more Sheikah still hiding in the city."

Link shook his head. A man like Ganondorf should know well enough the Sheikah weren't numerous enough to send armies to do the job of one or two assassins. "There aren't many of us left."

" _Us_ ," the King repeated with a cold smile. He paused for a moment, looking Link over intensely. "I would think a Sheikah such as yourself would hold onto his secrets a little longer. Especially from a man like Haema, who has borne you so much ill will."

Link thought for a moment. "I told Haema the truth… because he didn't want to hear it."

"What do you think he wanted to hear?"

"He… he wanted me to lie to him, so he could catch me in it."

The King released an amused breath. "There are few things Haema likes more than dispensing well-deserved punishment. But in the end, you broke. Your fear and bitterness won out."

When Link lowered his eyes, his shame wasn't entirely feigned.

The King readjusted himself on his chair. "You were always a worthy, faithful servant. You were competent and obedient and hardworking, or at least that is what the stablemen told me. You've given me a fine horse—the best I've ever had. But now you tell me you are here to kill me. How in the world did it come to this?"

Link swallowed a painful lump in his throat. "I don't know."

The King stared at him for a moment, mouth half open in what may have been a reluctant smile. "At least tell me how you gained your hearing. That detail intrigues me too much to pass over."

"I can't."

"You _can't_? Or you refuse to?"

"I can't. Neither of us can talk about it."

"Neither of us?"

"Me or… Impa."

The King stroked his chin. "Ah, yes. That's her name. My men couldn't wrestle even that from her. It's a good thing we have you, then, to speak for the both of you."

Link's lips curled into a snarl. "Haema told me she was dead."

"Did he?" The King scratched his beard, and offered nothing but an inquisitive look.

"So, which one of you is the liar?" Link demanded with a force that surprised even him. When the King only raised an eyebrow, Link couldn't stop himself. "I need to know if she's alive. I need to see her. Let me see her."

To his surprise, the King didn't strike him for his insolence. He merely raised his head and released a genuine, bellowing laugh. "Oh gods, you really are courageous," he said, wiping one eye as Link only reddened further. "Don't worry, boy. We haven't hurt her any more than we've hurt you." His eyes lingered on Link's persistent injuries, his ripped ear. "Although I can see that fails to comfort you. But my men know there is little point interrogating a fully grown Sheikah. My mother tried it during the War—and all she got for her effort was a pile of silent corpses. They have proven time and time again to be a stubborn, secretive lot." He paused, chair creaking slightly under him as he shifted his weight. "But you're not one of them, are you?" Link stayed silent, and the King repeated himself more forcefully. "Are you?"

"No."

"No. You're something different. We are about to find out what." He stood. "You are reticent, but that is fine. You will answer our questions soon enough. I merely wished to talk with you a little beforehand. In case we did not get another chance."

Link's heart sank as the King's knocks on the door summoned the guards inside. "Are you going to kill me?" he asked.

"Hopefully not." That was all the King gave him before the guards pulled burlap over his head and dragged him in fetters from his cell.

He was led in complete silence, directionless, blind. He could not tell where they took him; all he could feel was the cooling air, the ever-descending slope of the floor. The walls seemed to swallow all sound, the stone beneath his bare feet nearly froze his skin. He could not gauge the darkness of the place through the black cloth that covered his eyes, but if the dampness, the cold, and the bitter, moldy smells were any indication of where he was, he could hazard a guess. The atmosphere struck him as that of a cave—not the warm, well-lived earth of the elder's cave in Kakariko, but the dank caverns around Eldin's freezing streams, or the maze of bone-piled catacombs rumored to lie beneath the city.

Right when Link was sure the latter was where the King led him, to be dismembered and piled among the bones of the forgotten dead, he heard the creak of rusted hinges, and a wave of heat blew past him. The cloth over his head billowed, and as the guards pushed him through the door and into the room beyond, a few beads of sweat dripped from his forehead down to his chin. When they ripped off the burlap, hot air filled his open mouth, sweeping against his damp skin. Before him squatted something like an altar, the shape and size of a coffin, carved of black stone and decorated with runes. Beyond it, in an arched obsidian hearth, roared an enormous fire. Backlit by the flames and glinting gold stood a shadow recognizable as Barudi. She turned, eyes shining in the firelight, at the appearance of her husband. A smile spread across her face, her colored lips curling back over white teeth.

Link instinctively leaned back into the guards that held him, pushing his heels against the ground and throwing his weight toward the doorway. Whatever this was, whatever Barudi had planned that made her smile that way, he knew he preferred the catacombs. He knew he would've preferred to be taken back to his cell and left alone for months in the darkness, even to go back to Grog's bloody ballroom and dance for him. But the men behind him clasped his arms with metal fingers and pushed him deeper into the room, toward the witch. Ganondorf moved aside, and his wife floated toward Link, one ornamented hand rising in cheerful salutation. He could not help but turn away.

"I hope you are faring well," Barudi said. Her voice echoed thickly through the small room; its uncanny vibrations locked Link in place with something more preternatural than mere unease. When the guards unsnapped his fetters and pushed him toward the altar, he suddenly lost the strength to resist them.

Quickly, awkwardly, they shoved him onto the stone. The surface pressed flat and warm against his aching back, and it pulled his body down with a peculiar and insurmountable gravity. To his own dismay, he collapsed against the altar easily—every muscle in him seemed to sleep as his body lay itself across the stone. His arms fell heavy at his side, and when he tried to move, tried to even raise his hands or head, he found he couldn't.

Barudi must've seen his confusion at his own sudden feebleness. "Chains are a contrivance for the weak." Her voice hovered somewhere above him, in the entwining haze of shadow and firelight. "If you cannot hold a man down with your strength alone, then you do not deserve to."

Link could move nothing but his eyes, and even then, he kept them safely locked on the arched ceiling of black stone, smooth surface dancing with the light of the fire. He could not look at Barudi circling him like a hungry animal, golden shoes clicking against stone.

"Leave us." In a cacophony of armor and hurried, almost fearful footsteps, the two guards retreated. The heavy door creaked shut behind them, and the waves of fire-heat crashed against it and bounded back into the room. Link began to sweat anew. Even the King removed his cloak, folding it over his arm and leaning against the wall. Link tore his eyes from the ceiling and saw a clear bead drip down his long, curved nose. He met Link's stare and raised a thick red eyebrow, almost as if in amusement.

Only Barudi seemed unbothered by the heat. She had turned back to the fire, and held something up in its light. From what little Link could make out, it seemed to be a glass vial of a thick substance, reflecting the flames with an unnerving, biotic red. The witch raised it to her eyes, smiling at its pure color.

She glanced at her husband for a moment. "As with all things I do, I welcome your presence, my King," she said. "But as soon as the fire dies, I require complete silence. That is, after all, what the needle is for."

 _Needle?_ When a shiver of fear ran up Link's spine, he tried to wriggle, but the power of the strange stone held him firmly in place.

"Of course," the King growled, voice barreling like a shout in the tiny, sepulchral room. "I will do nothing to impede you; it's not often a Gerudo expatriate can watch a true ritual of his motherland."

"Then watch closely." She smiled, uncorked the vial and dumped its contents into the fire, and the flames sprang up to lap at her offering. The heat radiated against Link's feet, but he could not retract his legs; he just curled his toes and clenched his fists as the greedy fire swallowed the contents of Barudi's vial. She paused for a moment, then produced something small and thin between long-nailed fingers. With no concern for the heat, she thrust her entire arm into the flames and held what appeared to be a glint of thin light in the mouth of the blaze. She stood there for minutes, turning her hand slowly in the fire, spheres of light dancing off her bracelets. She did not seem to care if the metal burned her skin—she showed no sign of pain, no sign of any discomfort. When she pulled her unharmed hand from the fire, Link could make out the small object that glowed red-hot between her nails.

Barudi held the needle to her face and squinted, producing a length of golden thread and feeding its delicate end through the tiny metal eye. As she backed away from the fire and approached him, he tried his best to squirm from the uncanny grip of the obsidian altar. He could do nothing but crane his neck, roll his eyes back, clench and unclench his useless fists. She hovered for a moment, as if considering how and where to prick him, before deciding her best angle was directly above him. She situated herself at the crown of his head, and he could not help but think her eyes looked inhuman, oddly-shaped, lingering upside-down over his. He froze, that familiar pain in his heart spreading through his petrified torso. She gave him a thin smile before pinching his lips together and placing the tip of the needle on the left side of his mouth.

The metal by all rights should've still been hot from the fire, but when it met his skin and pushed inside, the pain was freezing. Slowly, the tip of the needle emerged from his lower lip and pierced his upper, impossibly smooth, impossibly cold. A bead of blood emerged from the puncture and dripped down into his mouth, searing like hot iron. He released a pained cry, muffled by his closed lips, but no matter how he tried to wiggle his way out, no matter how he tried to struggle, the gravity of the altar held him in place.

Barudi pulled the needle away from his lip and the golden thread tightened. Its thin length tugged slightly rough against the inside of his lips, drawing a few more beads of blood as each inch of it emerged slowly from his skin. She adjusted her grip on his face and plunged the needle in again, running a new stitch beside the first—the second prick stung twice as cold. When she pulled the thread tight, closing another small portion of his mouth, a new stream of burning blood trickled from his lips.

By the third puncture, he could barely breathe. Barudi pulled the thread tightly under his nostril, ignoring Link's increasingly pained grunts, noises that my have passed for screams had his mouth been free to open fully. He tried to turn his head, tried to crane his neck away from the hovering tip of her freezing needle, but the best he could do was tremble, shaking his head uselessly. It only made the pain worse, made the blood flow more quickly from his punctures. Barudi, releasing a frustrated sigh at his resistance, gripped his cheeks and dug her nails into them, holding his head in place.

"Be still," the King's voice echoed somewhere above him. "Or she'll do your eyes next."

"Your King is a wise man," Barudi told him. "You should listen to him."

Link did not have much of a choice. Even grimacing, even crying out, was sapping him of his strength. It took too much effort for him to wriggle, too much to even clench his fists. With the fourth stitch, his strength failed him and he fell back into stillness. He just closed his watery eyes and lay in exhausted silence as Barudi, after much too long, tied the last length of the thread and let go of his lips.

It took seven stitches to close his mouth. Barudi leaned back and examined her work, letting loose a sigh of satisfaction. She stepped to the side of the altar, and still holding the needle, leaned down to lay her head on his chest. His heart beat frantically against his ribcage, but even that, after a few seconds, could not muster the energy to palpitate. His eyes fluttered, his heart slowed, his voice, though he wanted to cry out, could not leave his throat.

"Now," Barudi murmured, head nodding a little with the slowing beats of his heart, "is the time for silence."

She lifted her head from his chest and readjusted herself, needle hovering over his heart. He could barely see the glint of metal in the firelight, barely see her tighten her grip over its tiny eye. He only spied her jeweled arm lift in the light, and in a terrifying flash of brown skin and shining gold, she plunged the needle into him.

* * *

His silence was absolute.

It was a familiar feeling. It was not unpleasant, at least not at first. As he had for so many years before Impa roared into his life, he now navigated a world of complete soundlessness. In this still and momentous place, he did not have his olfactory senses to fall back on; he could not feel anything through touch. All he had were images, jumbled, intangible displays of shape and color. He lay immobile, unresponsive to anything but sight, and watched the specters of his life rise before him, beyond his reach and beyond his comprehension.

At first he saw faces, too many to count, shooting past him almost too fast to recognize. Their features blurred, some brown, some white, some colored with red marks over eyes, cheekbones and chins. He saw the white countenances of Ordishmen and -women, flaxen-haired and steely-eyed like Haema, he saw the faces of the other stablehands, the broad, honest smiles of Gerudo. He saw the many shapes of the lost tribes of Hyrule; a wide Goron frown carved in Death Mountain's red rock, the lissome bodies of three Zora, twisting in the water, translucent fins catching the light of a rising sun. He saw the leafy, round wooden faces of the silent forest people, the ghostly white skin of fey children that never aged, blemished and browned only by the old pages of the book of stories where he had discovered them.

He saw Talon's mouth spreading in a wide smile under his thick chestnut mustache, a few crumbs of his last meal still caught in the thick hairs. Link watched the movements of his tongue, his lips twist over his missing front tooth, but he could not quite make out what the man told him. With one gnarled hand, Talon gave him a rusted, empty bucket and urged him onward in silence.

He saw Haema, huge hammer brandished high, long handle bending in the air as it came down to crush his head. The general's mouth, stained with the blood of battle, curled into a thin smile as he threw all his weight behind the blow. Link could not shut his eyes to the image, and through the glare of a bright Eldine sky, he saw his own blood spatter Haema's white tabard. The general, panting, lowered the hammer and lifted his eyes heavenward, where not a cloud passed over the terrible white sun.

He saw Galra's mischievous simper, the curve of her body as she pulled her feet over her head to the beat of eager stomping. He saw the shimmer of her orange hair, the smear of purple as her mouth opened over his. He saw Ahnadib's critical scowl and the wrinkle of her bejeweled brow as she lost herself again in deep thought. He saw the flash of Nabru's spear, infinite in its beauty, and the wet ripple of her bare muscle as she toppled another opponent in the fighting pits; the long white robe of her sect, flowing diaphanous at her feet as she bowed before the curving mass of her armored mother-goddess.

He saw the Elder, by her fire, hands raised and eyes closed, feeling out pictures in the heat as a blind person might feel a face. He saw her hair shorten, he saw her wrinkles disappear back into smooth brown skin as she took her first fated steps into the temple at the peak of Eldin. He saw other elders, other chiefs and warriors, saw their homes burn and their families flee their villages; Kakariko emptying, the buildings crumbling to disarray at the village's perimeter; gardens growing unattended as their planters fed the earth in a different way, buried beneath the rain-soaked dirt.

He saw Talporom and Irma, making a home for their children, Irma feeding her firstborn in a dusty kitchen, Talporom reaching down to cup her chin as he planted a kiss on the tip of her nose; Irma receiving her tattoos during the marriage ceremony, gripping her new husband's hand like he might fly away as Merel leaned over her with a needle, entreating the spirits to guide her hand; Irma watching her husband—and then her children—leave Kakariko for the hundredth time, unsure if or when they would return.

He saw Palo, and he saw what Palo saw; the evanescent figures of hunched elders long passed, the breathing of death through the trees, the nomadic souls of the restless fallen wandering through the forest and into the village; slit throats, burst limbs, wasting illnesses and headless bodies, women with bloodied legs looking for their lost newborns, Goron warriors fallen in the Eldin War, drowned and bloated children waiting impatiently for a playmate on a toppled grave, obscured in a billow of firegrass smoke.

He saw Talm, now smiling, now pulling her hair up in an messy bun, now knocking her big sister to the ground for the first time in a sparring match, now reaching, unknowingly, for Impa as Elder Merel, again with a red-tipped needle, pricked the first splash of color onto her face; Talm showing off her newly pierced ears; Talm dancing in the ceremony of the winter festival; Talm receiving her twin swords from her father the day of her eighteenth birthday; Talm on her stomach, unable to stand, trying to pull herself back to her feet with the looming branch of a spruce, leaving a trail of dark blood in the snow behind her.

He saw Impa, an infant blessed in the large hands of a Goron warrior; Impa by her father's side, barely old enough to stand yet asking for his knife; receiving her first lyre and then her second; on her knees before her father as he ceremoniously bequeathed his dead brother's sword to her; Impa now in Palo's arms, burying her head in his shoulder, now he in hers, asking her for the same sympathy and affection; her face contorting as the wolf spirits of the mountain ran her through with their uncanny icicles; her broad smile as she wrapped her arms around him and sighed softly into his ear; her fingers on harp strings, coaxing out deep and utter silence; her wrists bending to remove a curse; Impa screaming as she collapsed to the floor in a mess of harp strings and blood, falling, infinitely; now dragging herself from the foot of a grave, under the boundless stars of Lanayru.

He saw the gold hair of a familiar girl, now a baby, now nearly grown, leaning out a window, dropping a purple lily into his hands before retreating back into her room; her tearstained cheeks as she pulled him by her side through the halls of the Great King of Hyrule; an arrow piercing her throat, her hair billowing out behind her as she drifted through empty air, toward water black as night. He saw a golden light, a light so terrible and so limitless he had to shield his eyes, but he couldn't—he couldn't save himself from the encroaching brightness, couldn't stop it from piercing his lids, from burning straight through him.

His bones cracked in the heat like fire logs, every hair on his body singed into nothing, his skin peeled away in painful, oozing sheets, his eyes rolled back in his head as he burned; his whole body throbbed, and in his hand—his left was worse than his right—he felt his joints and ligaments bursting and snapping from the heat, his fingers blackening, his palm peeling away as the light pierced it, unrelenting, cracking his wrist and searing away his muscle to get at something—something beneath—something—

* * *

He gasped. The golden thread between his lips snapped in a glint of light, and he cried out. His voice emerged nothing more than a hoarse whisper, tortured with the effort of keeping silent. The terrible heat of the golden light still pulsated from his palm up his left arm, all the way to his brand. Sweat poured off him, blood dripped anew from his punctured mouth as the thread dangled uselessly between his lips.

Above him, Barudi heaved with effort, sweat running down her collarbones to her gold necklaces, mouth open, head lolling from shoulder to shoulder. Her arms hung at her side, her eyelids drooped heavy and dull. She swayed beside the altar, teetering this way and that, until the King appeared by her side. He outstretched his strong arms and steadied her on her golden feet. He held her upright as the last vestiges of her spell ran their course through her, and she slowly regained herself.

"There is not a doubt in my mind, my King," she panted. "He is the one."

Link, unconcerned with the discussion, struggled to move, and found the spell that had held him to the altar had weakened. He twisted around, shaking, trying to escape the excruciating pain in his left hand. He pushed his tired, aching body from the bed of obsidian, but could not manage to sit up completely. He rolled, grasping for any handhold, but only tumbled to the floor with a desperate flail and a pained gasp. He crawled away from the stone, but found he had nowhere to go, and no strength to even get there—the obsidian walls seemed to close in on him in shining arcs. He could not pull himself from his side, shaking hand alternating from massaging his burning left palm and plucking at the golden thread that still hung from his lips.

As he lay there, in agonized bewilderment, hands trembling too much to be of any use, Barudi regained her composure. Her voice was still colored with the jittering excitement of the ritual, but it rang through the chamber like a tolling bell. "Yes… yes. He is it, my love." She still stood shakily in the arms of her husband, but had the energy to gesticulate wildly as she spoke, as if there were no way she could express what she wanted to say through words alone. "He is the one."

Link writhed, inside and out. He did not know how much she had seen, how many images she had gleaned from his mind when she had driven the needle into his chest—instinctively his hand clutched at his heart but he found no needle, only a tiny bead of smeared blood near his left nipple.

"He is it," Barudi said, still half-tranced. "He is the quietness of the fields of this country, he is the passage of time, and its repetition."

Link kicked his feet to see if that would help the pain—it only exhausted him. No matter how he turned, how he massaged his wrist and grit his teeth, the agony in his hand lingered.

A tall shadow above him drew his eyes from his left hand to the King's hovering face. He just lay at the man's feet, twisting his body, swallowing his groans.

"He is it," Barudi said again, shaking with excitement somewhere in the darkness.

The King looked down at him with something like pity. "Well," he started, voice low and soft, "that's a relief."


	53. Of Kings and Generals

"I have not yet decided whether the burden of rulership should belong to the compassionate or to the cruel. When one attempts to better the nation she usually fails, while the other seems to succeed often, wholly accidentally."

From the unpublished diaries of Mandrag Garona

* * *

From the moment his crown had been set heavy upon his head, Ganondorf vowed to abandon indecision. As it turned out, the institution of kingship was nothing more than lists and lists of choices no one else could be bothered to make. He had done his best to sort through them as quickly and tirelessly as possible, disallowing himself to regret any of them. And when it came to these choices, his most immediate counsel was the distant echo of a voice in his head, sometimes coming in the form of his mother, sometimes his grandmother. One would insist he forgo all mercy and axe his difficulties without a second thought. The other… well, he was usually unsure as to what the other might say.

The King had advisors, of course, but he could not turn to them for a decision like this. They were practical, dependable, and had no time or energy to waste on a problem as absurdly insignificant as a willful stableboy. Haema had already voiced his opinion on the matter, loudly and consistently, and though the general had been right before, and often, the King still had Barudi's counsel to consider. Though Ordishmen, seemingly by blood, were suspicious of all things magical, all things foreign, Haema would have no choice but to acknowledge Barudi's input, not necessarily because she was his Queen, but because she was the wife of his beloved King.

Ganondorf did not want to disregard Haema's advice. He did not want to oppose him; the man had been nothing but helpful, offering his loyalty for more than three decades. He had helped the King plan and carry out his most important conquests and sins, flawlessly. He had followed him into battle and worse, so steadfastly and for so many years the King could no longer imagine life without the man at his side. There was little fault to be found with Haema—besides his habitual rages and his itchy sword hand, he was a most effective and treasured confidant. The general would, of course, continue to insist they kill this stableboy of theirs—in the public eye, obviously, so any of his allies hidden in the crowd could see what happened to those who opposed the might of the Hyrulean Crown. Ganondorf could not deny the prudence of that course of action.

Irresolution was not a difficulty that often visited upon the King of Hyrule, but in those uncommon moments where he found himself at a loss, he could always turn to the general (inevitably, he would be standing beside him, anticipating the question), and receive an answer not necessarily informed by Haema himself but by the nearly infinite knowledge of his highly educated kindred.

He was a child of the noble historians that comprised House Elanor of Relta, in the southern forests of Ordona. He had once explained to the King, when he was still a Prince, the intricacies of his prodigious, convoluted and almost incestuous lineage, but there were few outside of his homeland (a nation now nearly three quarters of a century free from Hyrulean dominion) who could understand such complexities. He was the son of the sister of some duke, who was in turn the cousin of the High Prince of Ordona—he had once said that if the honor and name of a family could truly be passed through the female line, he might've been High Prince himself. But as it was, he had been born of his mother and not her brother, and she had been born of his grandmother and not his great uncle.

Although somewhere in that convoluted mess of a bloodline he was _somebody's_ firstborn son, he was listed a dozen names down on the Duke of Elanor's lengthy will and set to inherit nothing. So he had little else to do but pack his historical tomes, shine his poleax and ride his father's white horse all the way to the Capital to try his luck making something of himself. By that time, Elgra had succeeded her mother Garona as Queen, and the first signs of the imminent Eldin War loomed on the horizon. Neither Haema nor Ganondorf could sense it at the time—they had been young, brash, eager to test themselves and their steel.

The War had affected the young Prince more thoroughly than his Ordish companion—or so it seemed to him. Perhaps it was the knowledge that his own mother, triforce in hand, had been the one to burn the Eldine countryside, to displace and destroy the people of the mountains. Maybe it had been the way the patriarch Durmia had called him out for a duel, man-to-man, as if that would solve the interprovincial dispute. Even at eighteen he knew he was not responsible for his mother's cruelties, only complicit in them. But when the patriarch demanded his presence, he obliged—if he could end the war before the Eldine winter fell, and all by throwing an opponent from a ring or breaking his back across his knee, he was more than glad to do it. Unfortunately, even after the dishonorable defeat of their leader, the Gorons did not surrender. It was not something Gorons did; it was simply not in their culture, their biology, and the admission of defeat was something obscene to them, forever beyond their collective ken. Maybe it was that sort of incomprehension of the idea of failure that forced Durmia to violate the rules of their fair duel. But Ganondorf, even in his youth, was a force to be reckoned with—even with the glint of Goronic steel swiping suddenly at his throat, he had won. He remembered clearly the look on Durmia's face as he was slammed to the ground, knife flying from his hand, his derisive snarl, the insults he spat. Through the broken, bloodied babble of Goronic, a semblance of Hylian syllables emerged, rife with hatred: _prince of darkness_.

If only Ganondorf could give himself so much credit; if only he could convince himself that his moral compass wavered so little. He knew whatever mud and stones the Gorons flung at his person were better directed to his mother. She would've worn the names with pride, shouted them as she mowed down the rolling brigades of their sons and brothers. She was the true bearer of the responsibility for Eldin, the true heir to his family's terrible golden treasure, the true inheritor of Ganond's legacy.

Which is why Ganondorf had to do what he did. He questioned the decision, of course, for months, just lingering on the possibilities, on the implications and consequences of it. But in the end, after years of heinous consideration, after hundreds of nights lying awake, staring at the canopy of silk above him, patterned with the sigil of his family, he realized he had no time for the luxury of indecision.

His grandmother always told him that cruelty skipped a generation in their family. But he started to doubt her words as he grew older, pruned and primed each day by his mother for his role as King. And by the time he turned thirty, with seven skirmishes and a full-out war under his belt, he knew his chance to retrace his bloodied footprints slimmed by the day. There would be no veering from that warpath if Elgra held sway over him, and the entire country, for much longer. And there was only one way to escape a woman with a gravity of presence like hers.

But he did not do it for himself. He rarely did anything for himself, but for the good of his country, the good of his future progeny and for the glory of his ancestors. The thought of it haunted him, racked him with guilt, until Elgra, resplendent as usual in full battle regalia, announced, nearly a decade after the end of the Eldin War, her intention to reignite her failed campaign. Ganondorf, equally impressive but somewhat less comfortable in his costume of battle, did not raise his voice. He knew there was no point in doing so. Garona had always said her daughter had the spirit of the Conqueror King in her—unstoppable, uncompromising, limitless in cruelty.

The King was not sure if he merely desired to mitigate the effect of his mother's ruthlessness; maybe it was because of the nagging voice of Garona in the back of his unhinged mind, maybe it was simply a desire to preserve the dignity of his family. Losing a war was bad enough, he could not contend with the possibility of losing the same war twice.

It was odd, the first time he said it aloud. _Haema. We are going to kill my mother._

Haema, a newly-promoted colonel with the world ahead of him and everything to lose, embraced the suggestion of treason with nothing but a stern nod. He wanted nothing but to follow his Prince, even to the gallows. So they retreated into Garona's old tower, a leaning, cobwebby monument of stone unused even by the servants. Ganond had built it as a gift for his beloved firstborn, unprepared for her to lock herself away in the company of spells and herbs, of history texts and novels, of paints and music, and emerge a diplomat rather than a warrior. Elgra, like her grandfather, had little taste for magic or books. Despite her son discovering early on his proficiency in the arts of his homeland, she relegated his talents to the mundane: the blade, the bludgeon, the shield and the reins of a good horse. She had told him he would receive his chance to utilize the otherworldly, when his time came.

His grandmother's books of herbalism and magic were buried in dust by the time he got to them. A good sign—the less known about his particular method, the less likely the palace physicians would pinpoint the cause. Haema proved invaluable during those unquiet months, guarding his secrets, appeasing his mother as the Prince's representative during meetings of strategy, stoking the fire with sacred wood of the Hill Provinces, fetching him all the eldritch materials he needed. It was an ancient Gerudo spell, but simple enough even a man could do it. By the summer's end, Ganondorf had made himself a handful's worth of unassuming black powder.

A sudden sickness overcame Mandrag Elgra when the first leaves began to fall; within the month she was bedridden, muscles wasting away, face sunken and dark. No doctor could discover the cause—more had been executed for incompetence in those short months than Ganondorf could count (he pitied them, of course, but they had not paid as high a price as he would've if the Queen's guard discovered her own son were the architect of her sickness).

She fought valiantly, as was expected, through the autumn and well into winter. But toward the end, to Ganondorf's surprise, she seemed to accept her defeat at the hands of this mysterious illness. She arranged her own burial, made plans for her son's coronation, and, of course, took time out of each of her last days to express dismay at his conspicuous lack of progeny. Like her grandfather, she concerned herself greatly with the assurance that her line would continue well after her death.

The last night Ganondorf saw her, he stood beside her bed as she stared out the window, to the blue-tinted snow falling beyond the colored glass. She stayed silent for a while, but eventually lifted her eyes. It was strange to see the yellow of her irises dulled by the dark haze of her illness, knowing he was responsible for the rheum that clogged their edges. "You'd better get yourself a wife before I die," she'd croaked. It almost scared him, how quickly her strong, deep voice had quieted, cracked with fatigue and an incurable cough.

He'd told her not to worry herself. He'd been marriageable for a long time and already had a sizable backlog of potential wives. He had no plans to marry any of them anytime soon, but Elgra did not need to know that. She didn't care about his marital state anyway—only with the production of children.

She smiled at him with the same condescending bitterness that colored every one of her expressions. "Some of the feistier citizens are saying that Haema is your only love, and that he sucks you off in that old tower of your grandmother's."

Ganondorf remembered dripping cold sweat at that moment. Not necessarily for any alleged sexual misadventures, but that his recent occupation of Garona's library had been noted by some servant or another. He'd long since hidden all incriminating spell books and materials elsewhere, but the possibility of discovery, even this close to success, gave him pause.

"Cease fretting," Elgra had said. "It's unseemly. If that sort of thing pleases you, that's all well and good, but unless Haema's planning on spewing your child from that pretty pink mouth of his, you'd better get yourself a proper woman. A Gerudo woman."

Again, he assured her he would. She voiced no more words on the matter, but leaned against her lush silk pillows, scowling. "Devils below, I would've hoped fate would give me the chance to die at the end of a sword. But perhaps I will go as Ganond did." He had died happy, ignorant, of old age in his sleep, despite almost monthly assassination attempts—at least that was the story Garona told him. It would not surprise him to learn that she had ended her father the same way he ended his mother now. "The Ordishmen will say I am weak and frail because I am a woman, the Lanayrun will say it is because I have desert blood and cannot handle the cold. Who knows what the Eldine will say. They will spit on my grave when I leave. So promise me, son, to make them pay for it."

Ganondorf promised. Before he left, she had reached out to him, gripping his wrist and holding him there with strength he did not expect from a woman so plagued with frailty. "You will use it," she whispered. He knew to what she referred—he had not yet touched the burning gold entity locked away in the northern tower. But he had seen his mother use it, glowing on her hand like an ethereal jewel—he could feel its heat radiate from her whenever she siphoned its preternatural strength, as if she were some alien sun, too close and too bright. Garona had confessed to him she'd never used that portion—instead she had chosen to bear another, risking her life to subdue the dangerous golden light that opposed their very bloodline. All to avoid the monstrous power of Ganond.

"It will change you, son," Elgra continued, pulling him to sit next to her. He could not tell if she wore a grimace of pain or a self-satisfied smile. She rarely wore an expression other than self-indulgent anger or practiced disdain. "But you will be better for it. You will begin to resemble him even more than you already do."

He sat still as she rested her thin fingers against his cheek. He reached up and held her hand there, and for a moment (the last, he swore to himself, that he would suffer such a feeling), he questioned his decision.

She died in the night, leaving her spiced tea (into which he had dissolved the final undetectable dose of powder) untouched at her bedside. It was the night before the winter festival, and the coldest on record.

Nothing had been said after that. He and Haema did not even discuss the matter between themselves. Elgra had sickened and died in the night, to the dismay of her physicians, and to the suppressed relief of a wounded populace.

The only person to ever know, or even suspect, of his act of matricide was Barudi, and it certainly wasn't because either of them confessed. Everything Barudi knew, she knew without explanation, without reason. Though that was to be expected of a rova. A woman who could speak with the desert's windy voice, entice a King through the lonely wilderness and summon a sandworm like an obedient dog would, of course, know many impossible things.

He hadn't returned to his homeland to marry a washer-woman, after all. He had returned to unify his country, to answer his homeland's call, to appease the curse of his family line. He had intended to fulfill his promise to his mother by finding a Gerudo wife once he had taken Obra Garud. When he began his march, he did not expect a wife to find him first.

But each step he took farther into the dunes, the call was louder. He could feel it pull at him, a voice he did not wholly recognize, but one he had known his entire life. It was his own, it was Garona's, it was the song of every drop of blood in his being. He had only read about the rova's chants in dusty texts, half-fantastical and written well before Ganond's time. But once he heard it, he knew. Rova had been companions, sisters, or mothers to Kings in ancient times, the texts had said; and he could hear the stirring of one ready to wake up.

He did not remember most of the trip from his camp at Obra Garud to the Colossus, and even the parts he did were dreamlike, as if he did not have full control over himself. He was not fond of that feeling, but by the time he had wrapped his hand around Barudi's and pulled her from the water, it had passed. In its place hovered an impossible energy, a heart-turning joy that something in his world had been completed. He supposed an idiot poet might idealize that as love, but he knew it was something a little darker than that. Poets unfamiliar with witchcraft often failed to account for any sinister magic at play.

His memories cleared about the time he realized all of his men were dead—even the ones positioned outside the Colossus, ones that Barudi had confessed she hadn't killed herself (that was when Ganondorf knew he had been followed, and he'd had more than an inkling as to who it had been). When he asked her why she felt the need to destroy his entourage, she just raised her hands to the sky.

"There is no worthy magic but blood-magic," she said with a smile. "And you have given me more than enough."

Hours later, when the worm came rumbling across the horizon, he could hardly believe it was not a mirage. But billowing in its rippling waves of sand came that musky smell, and the deafening, almost rain-like sound of rapidly shifting sand.

The worm had come faster than Barudi expected. Worms were stubborn creatures—they always scattered when the call was made. But one would always answer; by some unspoken law of their kind, at least one would find its way to her. She told him she was pleased it had been such a large one. When it followed them back to camp, the only sign of its presence a deep, eerie rumbling hundreds of feet below them, it had been docile, lethargic. When he asked her how it was possibly fit for war, she had smiled and run her fingers across his.

"You ready a worm for war the same way as any other animal. You show it blood."

He, like any competent commander, was not eager to lose any legions if he could avoid it. But, also like any competent commander, he knew marching on such a fortified city could never be a clean affair. His soldiers were wholly prepared, ecstatic even, to lay down their lives for him, and any worthy King was willing to accept the sacrifice of his loyal soldiers for the good of the kingdom. So he had bitten his tongue and let the smell of blood and battle summon the worm from its hypnotic state and straight into the gates of Obra Garud. He said more than one prayer over the lost battalions, though he was not sure to whom he prayed.

There were few rova spells, he learned, that did not involve some iteration of sacrifice. Obra Garud had been an extreme case, but even the fascinating display of magic he'd witnessed in the depths of his own castle was contingent on its own cruelty. He would never forget the sight of his wife, still as a statue for the better part of an hour, eyes rolled back in the blue light of dying embers, as an unconscious boy struggled violently but in complete silence beneath her. She had told him it was a dangerous spell, a taxing one, but he had not expected her to lie bedridden for days afterward. She had sacrificed much to perform that ritual.

In the wake of the spell, when Barudi identified the boy as the third (or, Ganondorf supposed, second, since the third had fallen to her death from the palace battlements) point in the gods' favorite trio of playthings, he now found himself plagued by the kind of doubt he swore he would never again succumb to. Just as he sat at his mother's bedside with her hand on his shaven cheek, now he stood wavering, wondering whether he should listen to his oldest friend and closest advisor, flawed as he may be, or the supernaturally-inspired but undeniably rational warnings of his wife.

Haema would tell him to kill the stableboy and be done with it. Barudi would tell him to keep him alive, but incapacitate him so he may not raise a hand against the Crown as Ganondorf reunified the country and stomped out his opposition. Both seemed reasonable to him, but something inside him, probably the echoes of his grandmother's voice, told him to do neither.

 _A true King is prudent and fair-minded—as able to grant mercy as he is to mete out justice._ Garona had repeated the words ceaselessly to him as a child. She would grasp his arms and pull him onto her lap, grey hair piled high above her brown forehead, eager to ensure her grandchild did not turn out like the other members of their family. She always did have an unmatched dignity, a wise sort of beauty in her. Even the demands and pains of her station as Queen, and as the unlucky daughter of one tyrant and the mother to another, had not sapped all the hope and kindness from her eyes. But now, as Ganondorf wandered the narrow halls of her tower, he could not recall her wizened face. He could not remember her as she had looked to him—his memory had been usurped by the images of her youthful countenance, immortalized in oil paint in frames decorating the palace.

He descended the spiral staircase, toward the cold dungeons, toward the stale air of the torture chambers and metal cells. The insuperability of necessity hit him harder with each step, and he knew that above all else, above what he wanted for himself or his country, what he wanted for daughters not yet born, would have to come second to the gods' golden curse.

 _My mother was right. This power has changed me. But not for the better._

He knew he would crumple under the burden of his heritage. He knew despite his protests he would have to play its game, as so many other did for so many centuries. He only did what was necessary. Everything he did he only did because it was necessary.

He stopped before the door to the lower chambers of the palace. The lush carpet terminated in a metal door, beyond which he knew there was only the dark halls and cells of the castle's securest prison.

 _Forgive me, my grandmother,_ he thought. _This may be the last thing I ever do you may approve of._

He adjusted his collar as a guard opened the door for him, squeaking on its too-used hinges, and stepped into the darkness.


	54. A Taste of Mercy

"No ailment of body or mind cannot be cured by a scalding bath, in my opinion."

Errachella, Eldine Performer

* * *

Link had spent several lifetimes (or so it seemed in that dungeon) sorting through what Barudi had done to him, and could make nothing of it. In the hours following the ordeal, after they had thrown him back into the safety of his lonely cell, he was too disoriented to consider all the things he'd seen, all the implications and contents of the visions Barudi had forced on him. He could only work to assuage the pains in his body. He spent the first while massaging his hand and arm, praying to whatever god that would listen to ease the burning in his skin, the ache in his bones and muscles. With each beat of his heart, an electric pain shot from his shoulder to his fingers, but he could only count himself lucky his heart was still beating at all.

His lips were the worst, not because they hurt as badly as his hand—they didn't—but because it seemed he could never manage to completely remove the filaments dangling from each puncture. He did not know how many broken pieces of golden thread he'd pulled from his mouth (or even if they _were_ thread, and not something more sinister). But he piled them at his feet, reaching up and pulling one fragment after another, digging into his stinging, bloody skin with chewed nails. No matter how many he drew from his mouth, he knew there were still more—he could _feel_ them, too deep in the flesh of his lips for him to reach.

Even after his blood had dried and the punctures had closed, occasionally his lips would prick and tingle with what he knew were the freezing debris of the golden threads. He could not dig them out no matter how many hours he plucked at his lips, so he just let them be, and tried to keep them from distracting his thoughts when he parsed through what he'd experienced.

He did not know what he'd seen. He had been fairly sure it had not been a dream, but he also didn't know what else it could've possibly been. He'd seen things, known things, that he could not have: Merel's ascent up Eldin, Irma's marriage, Impa as a baby and the ghosts and howling spirits of Palo's unique perception. He did not know why he'd been shown these things, or if he was supposed to have seen them at all. He had suffered similar hallucinations once before, at the peak of Eldin, but everything he'd experienced was within the realm of his own time and space. He'd never seen the past, he'd never glimpsed the future, though he couldn't be sure if the images he'd witnessed were either. Likely they were fictions he'd invented for himself—gleaned from details his companions had divulged to him in the many months he'd known them. It shouldn't be surprising he'd seen his own imaginings of Impa and Talm, of the ghosts of Palo's world, and the fears he harbored for his companions, but he did not expect them to wash over him with the intensity they had, and certainly not with the physical pain they had.

He did not know if the visions themselves were truthful, but the pain in his hand had been real enough. He didn't know where it could've possibly come from, he didn't know why that awful burning light descended on him, as mercilessly bright as the artifact he and the yellow-haired girl had encountered in their rush to escape the palace. He did not know what Barudi had intended when she started the ritual, or if she had seen or felt the same things he had.

 _I am the one_ , _she said. I'm what? What could I possibly mean to her, to anyone?_

It baffled him. He had been nothing but a meaningless servant for most of his existence. He had barely learned to read, barely learned to fight, barely even learned to speak his mind. He had nothing, and was nothing, so he could not for the life of him figure out _why_.

In the days following his return to his cell, he tried his best to uncover that mystery, whenever possible. He had learned there was no point in harassing the jailers who came to drop food at his feet or empty his chamberpot—they were perpetually silent and more than willing to dish out a beating or two for merely asking. Even his most consistent visitor, Haema, had not appeared in a long time—with a pang of guilt, Link realized he almost regretted so few injuries to nurse and agonize over. Goddesses knew he didn't have much else to do in this freezing, empty place, besides think too long and too hard about the irreparability of his circumstances. Images of Impa, alive or dead or both, still haunted him in the darkness, and he still had no information on her possible state. Link started to entertain the idea that she had not been captured at all, that she was still somewhere in the city or beyond it, no doubt planning his rescue (or so he hoped). Sometime during his deepest musings on that possibility, he heard the familiar sound of hinges creaking.

His body had accustomed to his sparse regimen of meals, and his stomach told him that it was not yet time for another portion of tasteless grey slop. He pulled himself to his knees, eyes locked on the door as a familiar shape strode in—tall, cloaked, decorated at the head with thin gold glints of a crown. Link did not know what the King wanted, or what he would do to him, but he could at least thank all the goddesses that Barudi was not with him. He scratched his lip, pangs of discomfort ringing out from the tiny motes of golden thread that no doubt still lay under his half-healed skin.

"How are you faring?"

A stupider mind might've thought there was some solicitude in the King's voice. Link knew better at this point. He remained silent with the surety the query was rhetorical.

Evidently he was mistaken. "I asked you a question. Answer it. How are you faring?"

Link did not know what the King expected of him. "Not… good." He lifted his eyes to Ganondorf's, to the yellow glint of his irises. Clearly the man wanted him to continue, but he had nothing else to report; only things to ask. "What… did she do to me?"

"It's hard for me to say. I've never seen anything like it, in reality nor in literature." The King crossed his arms. "It's an ancient, dangerous spell. But effective, or so Barudi tells me. She searched for the truths in you. She was simply asking you a question you could not avoid answering."

Link thought in silence for a moment. "Which question?"

"It's difficult to state to a man who does not already know the possible answers."

"What are the possible answers?"

"Yes, or no." The King seemed rather pleased with himself when Link lowered his head in frustration. "I'm feeling patient today. I will try to explain, if you wish. But I do not like the sight or smell of this place. You will walk with me."

Images of the desert, of a little girl's empty face lying under the moonlight, sprang from the back of his mind. He sat in silence, waiting for it to leave.

"You do not like the idea?" the King asked. "You have done it before; it will be no more difficult now than it was then." At Link's continued silence, the King leaned closer—but not quite close enough to get a full whiff of his unconscionable stench of blood, sweat and waste. "Haema has proposed an ultimatum I find quite reasonable; he will do nothing to your Sheikah friend he has not done to you. But if you show any signs of insolence, of disobedience, he will hurt you, badly. Everything he does to you he will then do to her, so you know what she feels. So you will walk with me. But you will clean yourself off first. In all my years I don't think I've endured a fouler smell than that stench oozing off you now."

Link managed to pull himself shakily to his feet, hand open against the wall for support. "Why… why are you doing this?"

Ganondorf turned toward the door but hesitated for a moment."Have you ever wondered why the worm eats her own tail?" Link stared in silent confusion at the King's soft chuckle. "Think about that for a little while."

* * *

Link did not think much about anything for the next few hours. He teetered in a trance-like state of disbelief as the cold dungeon walls around him made way for tapestries and windows, paintings and warm furnaces. A man had been assigned to him, to keep an eye on him and help him with anything he needed. At least, that's what the guards told him when they threw him into the bathing room and locked the door behind him.

The room wasn't large, but it shared the same sort of luxurious feel as the bath houses in Obra Garud—a deep, shining marble tub, shelves of scents and soaps, long pipes of hot water running along the walls. Sprays of heavily scented flowers sat on marble stands, curling vines hung from the ceiling, and in the corner, barely noticeable, stood a silent, perfectly motionless man. Link supposed he was the servant meant to care for him, the type who was hired to stay invisible until he miraculously showed up with the solutions to his master's every unspoken need.

To the right of the servant, so large it almost loomed, stood a tall, gold-framed mirror. Link had no desire to look at himself, but he couldn't help it. When he approached and peered into the glass, he saw a strange man staring back, empty-eyed, too thin and hunched as if with immedicable pain. Sunken eyes sitting dull over protruding cheekbones, grimy, shaggy hair, skin discolored with more stains and bruises than he could count—this man looked halfway dead. His right ear drooped slightly, hanging partially torn from his head, and he had the most peculiar scars across his lips—symmetrical dots, white and slightly swollen. Link gulped, watching a lump travel down the pale, almost greenish throat of the other man, down into hard, shadowy collarbones. Below that, a set of ribs cast bars of shadow, colored with grime, bruises, and half-healed stripes of scar tissue. He did not turn to look at his back—he knew what sight would meet him.

The only clothes he had left to him were his old trousers, gifted to him in Oldcastle when Impa taught him his role as a physician's student, now ripped and soiled to hell. When he removed those (at Link's undressing, the servant twisted the knobs of the faucets, hot water pouring into the tub), he saw a pair of thin, bruised and lacerated legs, shadows of hip bones, intact organs—despite Haema's repeated threats to cut them off, along with fingers, toes, and ears, if he did not answer his queries honestly. A pair of bony feet balanced his lean body upright by some miracle or another, and he crossed his thin, scarred arms over his chest, hiding his brand and the old mark Haema's arrow had left when he'd fled across the battlements with the yellow-haired girl.

He turned from the mirror, stepping toward the filling tub. But before he could slip inside, a decorative basket of flowers and fruit caught his eye. He reached out for what looked like a pear, but an embarrassed noise from the manservant caught his attention. He looked over to see the old man frown widely.

"Those are only for decoration," he said. Link pushed his thumb into the fruit, and a bead of juice ran down his skin. It was more than a little overripe, but clearly it wasn't wax. He raised it to his mouth, biting into the meat, sweet juice dripping down his chin.

The servant stared in shock at this peculiar violation of etiquette. Link might've been nothing more than an obscenely lucky prisoner, but he knew the man wouldn't dare issue an order for him to stop eating. Link remembered enough about his life of servitude to know that much. So he finished the pear and moved on to a bunch of grapes under a spray of pungent roses, and from there he moved aside some peonies to get at the apples beneath. He drank the juice of the fruit until he was no longer thirsty, ate the meat until he was no longer hungry, and the scandalized servant could only watch.

When he finished, belly distended, he made his way to the steaming tub. He ignored the servant's disapproving stare as the man poured bottles of oils and soaps into the water; from all those months in Kakariko, he was used to bathing in the presence of others—though maybe not used to being so heavily scrutinized. But he counted himself lucky at all to have a full stomach (though the novelty of it nauseated him a little), the lingering taste of sugar on his tongue, and warmth waiting for him.

When his feet hit the hot water, when he lowered himself and leaned against the stone, he exhaled in relief. Slowly, as the tub filled up to his waist, he felt his muscles loosen, felt the horrible ache in his bones start to fade, if only a little. He closed his eyes, letting the steam clear his blood-caked nostrils. He submerged his shaking hands and ran them through the water, letting the warmth crawl up his sore wrists all the way to his shoulders.

Then, quickly as the heat of the water struck him, he felt it drain away, leaving a trail of dry goosebumps on his skin. He opened his eyes and saw the servant holding the stopper's silver chain, a look of pity on his face. Link glanced about his body—the tub was not halfway full and the sheer thickness of his filth had already colored the water an opaque brown. He just shivered as the water drained, and relaxed as fresh, steaming water replaced it.

Link had little experience with oils and perfumes—even in Obra Garud, where Ahnadib's bath house was at his disposal, he had passed over them because he was not sure which was too strong, which was meant for what, and which would turn his skin blue if applied too thickly. The servant seemed to know what he was doing, pouring and spraying this and that until Link's sickly stench disappeared into a mist of rosemary and lemongrass. He just submerged himself in the scalding water, trying to rub the ache and grime from his seared flesh, ignoring the pain of his half-healed wounds. In the heat, his scabs came off him and floated toward the drain, one of his smaller injuries reopened on one arm and he lay a steaming cloth over it, waiting for the bleeding to stop before wiping it down any further. He submerged his face and head, ignoring the sting of the scars on his lips, running soapy fingers through his hair (he had almost forgotten it was actually blond under all that grime).

The servant started to empty the tub once more. Link watched dead skin, clumps of matted hair, dirt and clotted blood circle the drain, and he leaned back against the stone, feeling somehow relieved, like a burden had been lifted from him. His skin was now red and scraped clean—one more cycle of water could burn away the remainder of the dirt, could dissolve the blood from his hair and sear the ache from his bones.

"Hotter this time," he told the servant.

* * *

Link had never been presentable. Having lived his whole life knowing he'd invariably smell like some animal or another, his only goal was to pass as inoffensive. He had never been impressive, he had never turned heads, but looking himself in the garments the servant had thrown over him, he figured he could pass for respectable. The blood and grime had been washed from him. His hair, detangled and scented with oil, had been pulled back and secured with a length of leather (it surprised him how long it had grown in his captivity). Any cuts that had opened had been dressed by the begrudging servant and hidden under layers of high-quality silk and wool. He could've passed for a sickly noble, or a well-off traveler particularly haggard from a recent journey. He could've been anything, which he supposed was the point of this whole surreal affair. The King could not be seen walking with a stench-choked, shackled prisoner.

He supposed he looked benign enough. When the servant nearly kicked him from the door to the bathing room, he straightened his tunic, lifted his head and tried to stand tall. Two guards waited outside, and at Link's appearance, one turned with a swish of his long cloak and disappeared down the hall, armor shining a deep blue under the wide rectangles of tinted window-light.

Link couldn't quite figure out where he was. His last tour of the King's palace had been short, confusing, panicked, and had certainly not ended well. He hoped this one might end better, but he had his doubts. He supposed he had nothing much to do but wait and see. He was contemplating the lovely polished leather of his shoes when the guard returned with the King. Ganondorf looked him over with a half-satisfied frown and motioned for him to follow.

"Sire, do you wish us to accompany you?" one soldier asked.

"That will not be necessary." The King glanced to Link. "He is clever enough to behave himself." Link gulped, trying not to think of Impa, and nodded. He fell into step behind the King, and he was suddenly reminded of the disuse of his legs. He limped terribly, taking two and a half steps for every one of the King's, but he tottered and wheezed along, glancing over his shoulders at the bemused guards as they turned a corner.

"What do you know of the gods?" the King asked. He did not deign to glance down at Link as he spoke—he just strode on, cloak billowing behind him.

Link stumbled a little at the unexpected question. "N-nothing," he admitted. He had seen spirits, but no other gods than Molgera—those mundane enough to live in the physical world. He wasn't sure what could be known about the etherial, invisible gods of Hyrule proper, who spent their time in sacred, untouchable realms.

"Have you heard of something referred to as the golden power of the gods?"

"Yes."

This time the King eyed him, a cynical smile passing over his lips. "That is old knowledge. We do not speak of that power much anymore in this kingdom. Where did you learn of it?"

"Impa told me."

"Ah, yes. Your Sheikah friend." He paused to shake his head. "From what Haema says, it seems she had talked to you a lot more than she has talked to us."

It did not surprise Link to learn that even after all this time, Impa had spilled nothing. If anyone could hold their tongue against interrogation, it would be her. Then again, dead women didn't talk. A horrible thought struck him at that moment, and he had to ask. "Did Barudi… to her?"

"Look into her dreams? She tried, but you no doubt know Sheikah are taught from birth to protect the contents of their minds. There was little she could glean from it." At Link's terrified stare, he continued. "Ah, you mean the needle. No. That was truly a rare spectacle. It will probably not happen again any time soon, if any of us can help it."

Link lowered his eyes, aching under his uncertainty. He couldn't know if the King was lying to him; for all he knew, Impa could already be dead, she could've suffered much worse than he had. Hell, she could've escaped the palace dungeons, or avoided capture in the first place. She could be in Kakariko this moment, with Gwen and Zelda, telling herself to forget about him and focus on her duty to the little princess. "Will you let me see her?" he found himself asking, before he could stop himself.

"Perhaps. If you behave yourself." Link knew that was the most noncommittal "no" he could hope for, so he just shut his mouth and lowered his head. The King gave him a smile before stopping at a towering oak door. Link limped to a halt beside him, eyeing the large dark hand resting on the iron knob. His fingers gripped the metal but he didn't turn it. "You have proven yourself clever more than once," he said. "So I believe you will listen to me with a rational mind. You have not been so poisoned against the Crown that fed and clothed you your whole life that you cannot listen to reason."

Link's lips tightened—he was not sure what else he could do but nod his head in agreement with his King.

"So I am going to tell you everything I believe you should know, and then some. Perhaps you will reconsider your alliances." He twisted the knob and the door opened with a windy creak. "Perhaps not. But remember this. I have already shown you more mercy than you deserve. This is my last favor to you. Do not waste it."

Link nodded with full sincerity. He stood in the King's shadow as he opened the door, letting in the light of the outside world.

The palace gardens were in the full bloom of spring. An overpowering abundance of scents hit Link's nostrils all at once—wind through roses, budding trees, wet dirt and the distant, cloudy promise of rain. He covered his eyes in the sudden sunlight, legs shaking.

"You have been down in the darkness for longer than you thought," the King said.

Link did not speak; he just lowered his trembling hand from his eyes, swaying on his feet. The rare and lovely sight of the gardens in bloom, the sheer relief at seeing the sky again, the surprise at having learned the length of his captivity—all threatened to topple him from his feet and into the dew-dotted grass.

But he stayed upright, hands at his sides. His heart beat frantically against his ribcage, and when the King began his leisurely stroll through the palace gardens, he followed closely, breath rapid and shallow.

"We are heading toward the southwestern wing," the King told him. "But do not be surprised if we are intercepted along the way. It is difficult to walk through this place without being pounced upon by some dignitary or another."

As they strode through the garden, past branching roses, carpets of flowers, drooping willows and white cherry trees, the place did strike Link as being surprisingly public. Two dozen paces from them, a couple of ministers chatted, walking hunched over as if deep in mid-plot. A trio of ladies, with wide dresses and long blonde hair, stood under an oak, and not far from them, a couple of boys carried wooden swords away from the training yards beyond the northern wing, laughing and shoving one another. A man appeared to be courting a woman on the other side of a large pond, and from the look on her face wasn't meeting with much success.

"I have my own private grounds, of course," the King said. "But if one wishes to walk from one end of the palace to the other, he must traverse the wasteland of sociability." He nodded to a passing minister, who nearly threw himself to the ground at the approach of his King. "Sometimes it does get rather tedious, having to stop and acknowledge so many genuflections. I swear I know people better by the tops of their heads than by their faces."

A passing pair of ladies curtsied deeply, addressing their King in subdued and formal terms. They even gave Link a respectful gesture before continuing down the path toward the tulip gardens.

"Ah, look over there." Link's eyes followed the King's outstretched arm, and he glimpsed a quick flash of white fur in a distant shrubbery. He barely had time to register the flick of a bushy tail before the animal retreated into the shadows of the leaves. "It's Barudi's fox. It is odd how well the creature has taken to the gardens, considering its natural environment. Then again, it hardly has a will of its own, does it?"

A shiver ran through Link. "I don't know."

"She's watching us, perhaps. Listening through him. She is a curious woman." The King's voice took on a peculiar, almost friendly tone, forcing Link's littlest hairs to stand on end. "She's especially captivated by you."

Link followed more closely in the King's shadow, keeping an eye on the brush into which the fox disappeared. "Why?" he asked.

"You're an interesting boy with an interesting history. You grew up deaf but can hear me now. According to whom you ask, you've died several times in several different places. You have no dreams to speak of, and according to my wife, you've a very desirable heart." Link's eyebrows furrowed. "I suspect she means it literally. She has expressed more than once her eagerness to cut it out and offer it to her nameless goddess."

Link swallowed. "Oh."

The King chuckled. "Do not fear, I will not let her have at your heart. I'd much prefer you alive."

Link eyed a particularly beautiful patch of peonies before trotting after Ganondorf. "Why?"

"A very good question. I—oh, here comes a distraction. Cease limping. It's unseemly." Link straightened his stance and followed the King's gaze to a haughty-looking young man, white cape billowing behind him. He looked like a younger, scrawnier version of Haema, but he stomped at them with a force matching the general's. "Watch well, boy. I will show you the meat of diplomacy," Ganondorf muttered.

The young man bowed quickly, deeply. "Sire. My house's dearest ally and King of all Hyrule."

"Second Prince Daroen. How is your father faring?"

"He is… stubborn as ever, sire."

"It saddens me to hear it. Perhaps if he ever pays me a visit, he will be more willing to discuss matters of unification."

"He is unwell at the moment. First Prince Oerick is bearing the brunt of his duties."

Link could make out a slight, sinister smile on the King's face. "Ah, yes. Vital, sacred duties, my intelligence men tell me. Duties which apparently include open correspondence with the Knights of Hylia."

Daroen's eyes widened. "Sire, about the Knights—"

"Might I remind you it's a direct violation of your father's and my agreement."

"I… I hadn't known it was happening, your majesty."

"And now I get word that there are a few Knights wandering around in my city. You don't suppose Oerick has anything to do with that, do you?"

"I should think not," Daroen replied. "But I shall draft a letter to him immediately. I swear to you, your majesty, we will get this sorted out."

"Very good."

"Sire," Daroen shifted his tone, lowering his eyes, "even with your recent victory, things are not going smoothly in Ordona. Sir Haema is… less than optimistic about the situation."

"Haema is the staunchest defeatist I know, Prince Daroen. Do not lose hope."

"I was thinking, perhaps…" His eyes wandered to Link with almost palpable disdain. "Perhaps had you not already taken a new squire—"

"Worry not. He is merely a guest. We may discuss the matter at a further date. For now, I believe you have a letter to write." The prince could very well not keep the Hyrulean King longer than he wished, so he stepped aside. Ganondorf swept past him without a second glance, but Link's eyes lingered on the lordly young man, on the scowl that still twisted his face even in his deep bow. As the prince rose and turned from them, Link noticed a golden insignia on his cape. The wrinkles and folds of the cloth concealed its intricacies, but he could make out the shape of an eight-pointed star.

"Ordishmen," the King sighed, when they were well out of earshot of the young prince. "They are born pessimists. But you've only got to scare them a little and they jump right out of their morose stupor and into action."

Link folded his hands behind him, twisting his fingers nervously. "Does he know you're going to invade his homeland?"

The King stopped short, but his surprise seemed more pleased than annoyed. "Why would you say that?"

"In the desert, you told me as much. You're not going to stop just with the Gerudo Territories."

"You mean the Desert Province," Ganondorf corrected him. "But you're right. There can be no unified Hyrule without the inclusion of our former provinces. Though I am trying to do it on paper rather than the battlefield. I have been unsuccessful so far. The men of Ordona are stubborn, almost as strong-willed as the people of the desert.

"Daroen has been trying to talk some sense into the High Prince, but I know the Great Houses of Ordon better than they know themselves. They don't desire friendship with a Gerudo King. To a man like me they will only speak the language of battle. But I happen to be quite fluent." The King shook his head as he crossed a particularly intricate bridge. Link did not dare reach for the handrail, in case he chipped off some of the golden paint along its length. "It is good to have the second prince on my side, but now I must decide if I want such a man as my squire. Since the winter sickness had taken my last one, I cannot seem to find anyone worthy." He quickened his pace as he passed a pair of frantically genuflecting priests. Before them, the southwestern wing of the castle loomed, overspread with creeping vines. "Tell me, have you ever dreamt of being a King's squire?"

The question caught Link so heavily off guard he nearly stumbled over himself. He tripped and limped in silence for a minute, before the intensity of the King's impatience compelled him to answer. "Yes."

"Unsurprising. Even a lowly servant boy has aspirations. You've probably horsed dozens of knights and their attendants. It would make sense you'd dream of being the one riding rather than saddling."

Link had ridden plenty. He'd had to, to teach the animals to listen, to react, to stay calm and receptive to commands, spoken or not. But he couldn't tell the King that his dreams of riding beside him had sprung up the moment he'd seen him newly-coronated on that fateful winter festival nearly a decade and a half ago. The imaginings had only been exacerbated with the hundreds of electrifying tales of the Conqueror King he'd drunk down in Kakariko like so much wine.

When the King reached one of the many doors into the southwestern wing, he glanced behind him, seemingly uninterested in continuing their current vein of conversation. "There's the fox again. Perhaps if we slip inside quickly Barudi will not follow."

It struck Link as odd that the King would actively try to keep his own wife from eavesdropping. Then again, she was a rova—though no one had ever told him exactly what that was, he didn't doubt she could weave some sort of sinister spell with as little to start with as an overheard conversation. "You want to keep secrets from her?" Link asked.

The King paused at the door. "There is no point in trying. She merely disapproves of my inclination toward mercy, so I'd rather not subject her to it. She insists we keep you alive, but we sever your spine so you cannot move. She says it is best if we cut off your hands so you cannot raise them against us. She is right—that _is_ what I should do." He opened the door with a creak. "It is better than Haema's suggestion that we execute you and be done with it. As for me, I would prefer to simply puncture your eardrums so I might have someone to sermonize to with impunity. But until then, you will want to listen to what I have to say." Link hesitated at the doorway, until with a polite gesture, the King ushered him inside.

* * *

Hey all! I just realized that a curious guest asked a question about the characters' ages/names a while ago and I forgot to include an answer in the last chapter, so here you go:

Link, at the start, was about 18-19, now he's probably 20ish (a lot of these ages are ambiguous, even to the characters themselves-Link has no idea how old he is). Impa was 24, Palo 25, Talm 22. Ganondorf and Haema are both around 46, Irma's 50, Talporom's 52. Nabru's... a little older than the gang, late 20's early 30's. Galra's a baby, a little younger than Link. Nobody knows exactly how old Barudi is. I doubt even the gods know that.

So about names: At the time of conception I tried to stay true to canon, meaning I used what names I already knew from the games. Back then (pre-BOTW) the only canon Gerudo names were Ganondorf, Nabooru, and Aberu/Aveil (I didn't really count Kotake and Koume, since they're named after Japanese pickled fruits, apparently?) I took the more commonly occurring letters from those three: N, B, U, and crafted names from there. Nabru (named after Nabooru), Galra, etc. Sheikah names were similar—the only Sheikah I knew of at the time were Sheik and Impa. So we got a lot of Ms and Ps, some Ks, (and Ls for some reason? I dunno). Talm is named after her father, Impa after her mother. Irma doesn't mean anything in particular (I'm happy to hear your theory about it, though), but she counts herself lucky to have one of the more normal-sounding names from her family. Ask her sister Uskra. Palo got 'Palo' because it's simple, upfront, and a shorter version of the name I originally gave him (which I can't for the life of me even remember—he's always been Palo to me now). Haema's name incorporates the 'ae's indicative of the Ordish House Elanor, and it helps that 'hem' is also a prefix denoting blood ('haem' in British English), but that was a happy accident for me.


	55. In the Hall of the Ancestors

"The stories of the Dragmire line are both endless, and endlessly contradictory. Open any book, ask any willing mind about it, and you will hear tales of diplomacy and warfare, unity and division, cruelty and kindness, greed and generosity, all in equal measure, all recounted often from the same mouth."

Ricard Auru, _The Untold Histories_

* * *

When Link's eyes adjusted, he examined the room around him. Suits of armor, both Gerudo and Hylian, lined the walls between ropes and tapestries of silk. Shields of sandworm scales and weapons so needlessly ornate he could not guess their function glinted in uncountable rows, each more sinister than the last. To Link's relief, the King strode across the room without so much as a glance at the intricate metal around him. Link figured the King didn't need to resort to pilfering weapons from the castle collection to cut him down anyway; he already carried a glinting knife at his side, slid into a golden sheath. It appeared to be decorative, unused, the kind of weapon a King would wear for nothing other than leisure.

He must've seen Link staring at it, since he stopped for a moment, laying his hand on its hilt. "A prize I took from the Goron patriarch after our duel," he said. "Made of this land's strongest steel and inlaid with runes said to seal away darkness." He tapped the gold pommel but didn't draw the blade. Link preferred it sheathed anyway. "Durmia drew it during our fight, though it had been agreed upon that there would be no weapons. I admit, I was caught off guard. I didn't think it possible that a Goron patriarch could be so devoid of honor. Even those who had seen the duel couldn't believe it."

"Why not?" Link asked.

"You are probably too young to have met one, but Gorons were known for three things: their toughness, their impeccable metalwork, and their unbreakable code of honor. Everyone during the War knew the Gorons would never surrender, that much was obvious, but none would ever believe they would cheat to do it. I'm sure even the historical records have nothing ill to say about Durmia. But I do not mind; I won regardless. And I keep this as a reminder to never disregard the impossible." He took his hand away from the knife and made for an arced doorway, carved with Gerudo designs, decorated at its top with the King's familiar triangular insignia. "Here we are. The hall of my ancestors."

The King led him through the doorway into a red room, wide and lushly decorated, torches burning bright in ornate sconces against the wall. High on the ceiling, triangular windows poured generous light into the room, flooding the walls and carpet with gold. On either side of the wall, lengthy portraits stood in elaborate frames. Link could not take his eyes off them as he followed the King. He had never seen paintings so big, so detailed, or so oddly discomfiting. Even the most realistic Gerudo statues did not make him feel watched as these portraits did.

"We shall start at the beginning, I suppose," Ganondorf said, approaching the nearest painting. He seemed rather pleased with the way Link's mouth fell open at the sight of such huge portraiture. "Do you know who this is?"

Link did not need to stretch very far to guess. Out of the four people who stood immortalized in the oil, the largest and most prominent was an easily recognizable figure. Even though the other depictions Link had seen of him differed a little from this one, his mien was unmistakeable: the wide face, the red beard, the way his lips curled under his nose almost in a snarl. Link had not seen the countenance in such detail before—it was clear that whoever had painted this had done so in the presence of the Conqueror King himself.

"Ganond," Link nearly whispered.

"And who stands with him?"

A woman and two girls stared down at Link. One child had a lovely, round face, wide yellow eyes and red hair pulled back over a jeweled forehead; the other wore an almost worried expression, frown framed by light, straight hair. They both looked to be about seven or eight, but Link could guess which one would grow up to be the fabled munificent Mandrag of the Schism War era.

"The one on the left is Garona," he said.

"Very good. It looks like in your absence you have not totally failed to educate yourself. Do you know who the other two are?"

His eyes wandered to the face of the Gerudo woman next to the Conqueror King. Her massive shock of fire-red hair was drawn up from her forehead in a voluminous ponytail, and the complacent grin on her colored lips almost matched Ganond's. "No," Link admitted.

"If you look closely, the text etched in the bottom left names the woman as Nabooru edh-Garudan, Ganond's wife and finest general, although the woman standing here is not her. Nabooru herself was dead by then, so her sister Aberu, who resembled her in nearly every way, offered to pose for the portrait." Ganondorf took a moment to point to the date, etched into the paint near the Conqueror King's armored foot. "643 by the stellar calendar. This was painted little more than a hundred years ago. My grandmother was eight then. My great aunt, six."

A twist in Link's gut moved his gaze from the woman's contented face to the second girl. Her eyes were large and brown, her lips were drawn tight as if in dissatisfaction. The way she clenched her fists at her sides made her seem nervous, as if unready or afraid to be painted.

"Nadiba was her name. It comes from the root _nadib_ in Gerudo, meaning moonlight. I do not know if Ganond named her as such because of her pale hair, but I would not be surprised. She is quite lovely—they both are. Although the artist painted out any blemishes on their faces. Or bruises." Link clenched a fist and glanced up at the King. He wore no expression, or at least none that Link could interpret.

He bit his lip, gaze returning to the portrait. He lingered on the faces of the two girls. "They look…"

"Sad," the King finished for him. "Those were difficult years. Treacherous years. The Queen had hung herself in the north tower barely a season before, and the King's hold on the country was tenuous at best. This was soon after the Faronian Uprising, when tensions were high. I suppose you've never heard of it."

Link wasn't sure. He may have heard Impa mention it during their long sessions in the elder's library, but he couldn't quite remember. He had learned so much in so little time, it had been difficult for him to retain all of it.

"It is a long, harrowing tale; most of it has been omitted from public record. Garona did her best to repress the stories after her father died. I cannot blame her." He glanced down at Link. "It's odd, come to think of it. During that time my great-grandfather had a fair bit of trouble from a boy like you. A boy eerily just like you, I would argue. He came from humble beginnings—he was a woodcutter from Faron, not too striking, not too special, from the reports he even looked very much like you. But one day he took up a sword, mounted his horse, and decided to take back his country from the man who had conquered it. He was not the only one responsible for orchestrating the Uprising, but he was the only one to exasperate Ganond so much the Mandrag decided to seek him out personally. And when he finally caught him, do you know what he did?"

"No."

"He dragged him naked through the city streets, chained him down in the town square and started the longest public execution in recorded history. For the most part, guardsmen kept the boy alive, feeding him, sponging water into his mouth, and keeping away any citizens who might want to cut the display short, out of mercy or hatred. Every few days, the Mandrag would come down from his castle and cut off a bit of his prisoner. First the tips of his ears, then the first knuckles on his fingers, then his toes… He dismembered him inches at a time, and gifted the bits and pieces of him to various nobles around the city he suspected of dissenting. Those who were rumored to be plotting against him would get a thumb delivered to them, or in the worst cases, a slice of genitalia." Link made a small noise of disgust, but the King ignored it, moving away from the first portrait and toward the second. "It _worked_ , mind you. He successfully terrified all parties into accepting peace, which is a miraculous thing to do, especially in those times of unrest. And he kept up the act for longer than anyone would've thought possible. When winter rolled around, Ganond had something of an operating theater built around the boy. He stoked fires to keep him warm, posted guards to keep him safe, hired surgeons and healers to keep him from bleeding out. By this time, the Conqueror King was busy sawing through the young man's leg bones. Do you know how long it took him to die?"

"N… no," Link muttered.

"I'll let you imagine that detail for yourself—but it certainly wasn't quick, I can assure you."

A shiver ran through Link as he followed the King to the second portrait, this one of Garona as Queen, with a small daughter at her side. There was no consort included in this depiction—she seemed content enough without one. Her eyes did not plead as they had in the previous portrait, her stance was that of a woman in charge of her own fate. "We do not speak of that incident anymore. My grandmother tore down that theater and attempted to erase the tale from history. She tried to erase many of Ganond's deeds." The King hovered over his words for a moment. "She used to tell me that cruelty skipped a generation in our family. That she and I were the only sane ones. I have been trying my best not to prove her wrong." He laughed a little and gestured to the girl beside Garona, all big yellow eyes and bright red hair. "Elgra had much of Ganond in her. Up until her death, she followed the same path as he. You have no doubt heard about her exploits in Eldin—from the Sheikah, I assume."

"Yes," Link said.

"I am sure much of what they have told you is true. It was a difficult time for both sides."

Ganondorf moved on to the next portrait, of Elgra grown, resplendent in armor, with her own child at her side. Link stopped and stared at the boy's dark face, his furrowed red brow, and saw lines of familiarity in the full cheeks, the half-hardened eyes.

"Does it surprise you to see me like this?" the King asked, amused. "You may not believe it, but I was once a child. I was once a young man, idealistic and hopeful. I once dreamt of peace and unity, but it was not to be during my mother's time, certainly. Her failed attack on Eldin should have told us as much. But I have much more at my disposal than she had. I have retaken our ancestral land—I have all the power we lost when my people came over to this country in the first place." He gestured to the right of the portrait, at an empty spot on the wall. "When the country is at peace and Barudi bears our child, our portrait will hang here, next to my mother's."

Link glanced up at the King, the realization of his situation sweeping over him in the span of a second. The strangeness of the whole affair struck him like a hammer, and he lowered his head, thin hands digging into his pockets. "Why are you telling me this?"

The King seemed pleased with the question. "The majority of conflict stems from misinformation. It was one of Garona's pearls of wisdom she left to me before she died. I want you to know a little about this country and those who rule it before you make any bold claims about anyone's right to this throne. I want you to look into the faces of the people who built this city, who've governed both with wisdom and ruthlessness, who have committed sins and sacrifices to hold what is left of this broken country together." He paused for a moment, staring into the oily face of his mother. "Besides, I am not simply showing you my family lines. I am showing you the evolution and inheritance of the power of the gods themselves."

Link scratched the back of his hand and tilted his head.

"Haema tells me you stumbled across a portion of it when you were gallivanting through my halls with the insurgent's daughter. Surely you remember that light."

Link nodded.

"The old royal family has always had a portion of that light. That is how they secured their own dominance, through the might of the gods. After all, what royalty would they be if they had not the strength to crush dissent? Like any great power, it was misused—often. Even before Ganond destroyed that family and stole the artifact from them, it was largely used for nothing more than securing the prosperity of the one wielding it. Many seem to forget that over the course of the centuries." Link could not recall Impa telling him anything of the sort about the old royal family, but he didn't speak up.

The King folded his hands behind his back as he led Link away from the last portrait, past the empty spaces on the wall reserved for Ganondorf's own descendants. "I do not know how my great-grandfather secured his own fragment of that power. Some say he was born with it, when he sprang fully-grown from the mouth of Molgera herself. Some say he found it in the deep desert, in a temple unseen by mortal eyes for millennia. Some say Din descended from the heavens and gifted it to him when he proved strong enough. In the end, it doesn't matter. What matters is that it enabled him to charge through Hyrule, burning all in his path, until he seated himself on the throne of the country. What matters is that I have proven myself worthy of it and it has passed from my mother's hands into mine.

"The third piece, however, has been somewhat of a mystery. Whereas the first and second can be tied to the bloodlines of the old ruling family and the new, the third does not appear to attach itself to any lineage. It is a mysterious little entity, emerging unexpectedly and from unexpected places." The way he looked at Link made him shrink a little. He clenched his jaw and met the King's gaze, hoping he hid his fear and confusion well enough. "The reason I desire for you to live is not simply because I prefer hostages to corpses. It is because you are likely to be the place the power to wield it springs next."

Link's heart fluttered for a moment before dropping deep into his belly. "Me?" he whispered.

The King nodded. "You yourself told Barudi as much."

So that was the nature of her spell. That was the light that had arrived with his hallucinations. It certainly seemed absurd to him. Images of the golden light passed through is mind, the obscene power that had nearly blinded him, that had called out to the yellow-haired girl, that had floated with such mystical energy from the King's open palm in the desert—that Link could possess such a thing was an impossibility. It made no sense. If he was special in some way, and he _wasn't_ , whatever latent power lay inside him was mundane, absolutely nothing like the grand golden light he'd seen in the southeastern tower of the palace.

"The old royal family's line has been severed," the King continued. "And, excluding of course the slim possibility of an unnamed Ordishwoman, there will be no wayward princess coming to steal her alleged birthright from me. I have full mastery of my own portion. The only part of this equation left unaccounted for is you." Instinctively, Link took a step back. His right hand grasped his left, and he squeezed, suddenly pained by the eerie atmosphere. "If you die, I do not know where that power will disappear to, nor do I know where or when it will reemerge. And I prefer to have all variables under my control." The King let Link have his space, giving him a thin but seemingly genuine smile. "So you will live. It is simple."

Obeying some instinct he didn't understand, his left hand slid behind his back, as if he had something to hide. "Back in the desert, you looked at me… at my hand. You said I was no threat to you."

"But I did leave room for the possibility that you may grow into one."

"Have I, then?"

The King laughed. "Hardly. I simply prefer to nip sinister buds rather than wait for them to bloom. You certainly have not yet earned your keep in the gods' eyes, even I can tell. But you managed to escape from my camp under my watch, follow me through the harshest desert to the Colossus, even hold your own at Obra Garud. Notable exploits for a lowly stableboy." The King shook his head as he led Link to the opposite doorway, away from the light of the grand hall and the eyes of his ancestors. He spoke softly, as if more to himself than to Link. "Perhaps it is most merciful for you never to rise to your potential. Few know the suffering that kind of power can inflict."

Link followed him through the doorway to the corridor beyond. He thought about where the King might lead him next, and figured it may be to the tower above them. He had extrapolated, after his encounter with the yellow-haired girl, that a portion of the golden power must've resided in each of the three towers, safe atop their altars from the greedy hands of interlopers and traitors. He'd already seen two parts of it, but the third…

"So, you don't have the third piece," Link ventured.

The King stopped and narrowed an eye at him. "When did I say that?"

"You said—"

"I said I did not know where the power to wield it would appear next. If the histories of old have any truth to them, any peasant boy worth his salt can take it for himself. Of the three, it is by far the most capricious."

A bead of sweat dripped down Link's temple as he stepped out on a creaking limb. "Show it to me," he said, voice shaking.

From way the King looked at him, it surprised Link that the man did not strike him. "If you test my generosity further I cannot guarantee Impa will not come to harm."

Just hearing the King say her name forced Link's mouth shut. He lowered his eyes as the shadow of the sovereign passed over him, down the hall and toward the stairs at its end.

"You have had a trying day, no doubt," the King told him. "Walking around gaunt as you are." He began his ascent up the staircase, Link following close behind. "Now, I can take you back to your cell if you wish, or we can see if there is an empty room up here. I shall assume you prefer the latter."

Link just limped at the King's side, panting up stairs, until they came to a long hallway. The King led him through the torchlight, glancing at doors on each side, until a Hylian servant girl came dashing around the end of the hall, folded bedclothes in hand. When she spied her King at the end of the corridor, a horrified look passed over her face and she fell to the floor, throwing the sheets before her and pressing her forehead deep into them.

The King wasted no time. "Tell me, which of these rooms is unoccupied?"

The girl's face was pressed so hard into her pile of bedclothes her words were hardly intelligible. "All to the left, your majesty."

"Good. Go fetch a pair of guards and return here immediately."

The girl pulled herself to her feet, and barely remembering to grab her bedclothes, sprinted to the other end of the hall and disappeared. The King ushered Link through the nearest door, into a simple yet elegant room, and stood in the doorway as Link surveyed his unfamiliar surroundings.

"I have given you a day of respite from your solitude. I have shown you sunlight, let you bathe, regaled you with a story. It is far more than you deserve, as you are no doubt aware. In return you will do me a favor and keep to yourself. You will go back to your cell if you cause any trouble."

Link ran his finger along the glass top of a table, looking at his transparent reflection on its surface. "If I behave, will I get to see Impa?" he asked.

"Perhaps."

Link gulped and made his way to the wooden four-poster, resting his tired shoulder against one of its intricate pillars. "Seeing as…" he stopped himself midway, knowing he walked a thin line. But he mustered the strength to continue, just in case. After all, the King had certainly been feeling generous today. "Seeing as you will do to her what you've done to me… and you've given me a bed… perhaps she can have one as well."

The King threw back his head and laughed derisively. "Oh, you are a fearless boy indeed." He narrowed his eyes, unflinching and unmoved. "It will do you good to recall what I said about testing my generosity." At the subdued clink of armor sounding through the corridor, the King withdrew himself from the doorway. "Food and clothing will be brought to you later. Keep in mind that two guards will be posted outside your door if you feel the need to wander."

With that, the King left Link alone in the silence of the elegant room. He looked around for a moment, then instinctively wandered to the single window. He ran his fingers along its edge, along the bumps of resin that held each of its stained components together, looking for some sort of handle, hinge or device that would allow him to open it. He found none, which may have been just as well, since he had no idea if he'd be able to sidle along the ledges of the palace as he'd done last time, or if this particular wing of the castle had any outcroppings for him to grasp. Even if he did escape the room, he was not sure where he would go. If Impa was still held in the prisons, they would no doubt kill her when they found him gone.

He lowered himself slowly onto the bed, soft mattress compressing under him. He just sat in shock for a moment at his sudden and unfathomable change of surroundings. He ran his fingers across the silk sheets, holding onto them as if for dear life. He tried to calm himself, tried to make at least a little sense of what had happened to him.

Impa would tell him to breathe deeply, to meditate on what he had learned, to divide the mysteries into small parts and sort through each separately. She would tell him to ask himself simple queries, to start with the seemingly obvious, to pass over nuance until he had a solid grasp of where to follow his own line of questioning.

So he did. He skipped the ones he could not readily answer; such as Impa's location or health, if he could escape or how, or the true nature of that terrifying golden power. He started with a topic he deemed obvious: himself. Following the prompts of the logical voice in his head (that often spoke with Impa's inflections), he sorted through what he deemed must've been the simplest and easiest line of questioning: who he was. The answer was obvious. He was a lucky stableboy who could not and would never wield any sort of power attributable to the gods.

So then the next question was if the King was mistaken about him. Link had never entertained the thought the King could be fallible, but if that were the case, the only alternative was that he was lying. He tried to come up with the reasons the King might lie to him about his ability to wield great power: he might wish to torment him, to build up his ego and knock it down… no, the King was too practical a man to waste time on petty spite. But he had taken the time to talk with him, to guide him through the gardens and the hall of portraits, which proved his sincerity. If he did not think Link was valuable in some way, he would not bother to waste time on him. In fact, Link doubted he would even bother to keep him alive.

It was clear the King intended to entice him in some way. Perhaps the man merely sought to ease his own conscience after what Haema and Barudi had done to him, but Link discarded the thought. It was obvious he was trying to ingratiate Link to him in some way. Perhaps he valued Link enough to wish to have him on his side.

It slowly became clear to him that the King was sorely mistaken. Barudi's spell had failed her, and she was leading her husband down this path of untruth. And Link had to accept that. There was no backing out of this, no reasoning with a man so certain of his own opinion. He knew he wouldn't be able to convince the King of the truth. But he decided he would gladly play that part if it gave him some advantage over Ganondorf or Barudi. He would do as the King might command him, he would stir up no trouble, he would pretend to believe every word the man said; about himself, about the kingdom, about Impa. He would let Ganondorf believe he had successfully scared him into submission, he would let the man think Link had no doubts that Impa was alive and in their hands. And in the meantime, he would devise a way to find out. Somehow, he would convince the King to let him see her.

He lay back on the soft pillow, folding his hands over his chest and staring at the ceiling. He kicked off his fancy shoes and sighed, watching the blurry, colored sphere of sun retreat across the window. Now in an infinitely more comfortable dungeon, he had little else to do but close his eyes, let himself sink into the downy covers and lose himself in thought. He figured if he was stuck here he might as well make himself comfortable; after all, he still had a meal to look forward to.

* * *

Phew! Thanks again, everyone, for coming along for the ride, leaving questions and comments and theories and all that jazz! Things are going nucking futs in real life right now, so I'm not sure if I can manage to post two weeks from now, but if not, it will definitely be three weeks! Sorry about that. Long, boring chapter, then delay. What can I say. I'm an anti-pleaser.


	56. Link's Choice

"Here's one important secret to success, in my opinion: never trust a well-dressed man. Especially if he's smiling."

Barta Oragudan, Councilwoman of Obra Garud

* * *

When Talporom left Silk, it was almost to his relief. He did not mind the city itself, or working with Elpi or Sheim (they were arguably the most competent Sheikah around), but if he had to sit through one more meeting with those squabbling sons of Ahnadib, he thought he might throw himself out the window and into the river valley below.

Each day following the reunion of the brothers (including the eldest, who had returned from the Capital with Galra and Nabru—and word that Link and Impa were safe and on track to their goal), they had wasted hours above a marble table, screaming at one another. Dry-eyed but still reeling from the death of their beloved (or, in more than one case, not-so-beloved) matriarch, the children of Ahnadib did nothing but bicker. There was no bitter subject left untouched: the war, their childhoods, money—especially money—though there was nothing left to inherit of their mother's great fortune. It had already been allotted to the members of Obra Garud's new council, the King's Gerudo ambassadors, and whatever other lackeys to whom the Hyrulean monarch had promised riches.

Galra, the youngest and favorite, just sat in sad, indignant silence. Talporom didn't know if she still grieved for her mother, or was simply displeased with her brothers drowning her out—she wore the same face a young Talm used to when Palo and Impa would talk over her. The two eldest sons, Innar and… Naboor, perhaps, or maybe Tinar (they looked and acted so alike Talporom had to commend Ahnadib for even being able to tell them apart), were always the loudest, leaning over the table to spit vehement Gerudo in each other's faces. The other children watched, some with dismay, some with indifference, as the brothers discussed in no minced words the idiocy of one another, the failure to protect their mother or her legacy, their imminent arrests and executions. Or at least that's what Talporom had caught. He did not know as much Gerudo as he would've liked. As a young man he had eschewed study of that language in favor of Goronic, since it seemed much more practical at the time. Indeed it was—in the days of the Eldin War he had much to discuss with the patriarchs of that particular tribe. Of course he hadn't planned for the total annihilation of the Goron race, but then again, he hadn't planned to find himself an ally of the surviving spawn of a murdered silk tycoon, listening to them argue about exactly what to call the resistance movement they planned to stir up.

Talporom may have been a little stringent in his definitions, but in his book, sitting around a table in Silk and yelling at one another did not count as a crucial step to staging a successful coup. But he, Sheim and Elpi were here to act as enablers and allies, not leaders. The Gerudo could not feasibly reclaim their country if foreigners were at the movement's head. But spirits' love, those people were worse than the Obra Garud council. It seemed that open, vehement democracy certainly brought out the worst in people—or at least their worst opinions, which Talporom counted as one and the same.

When Nabru, perpetually unruffled by the screaming around her, walked in with a message, he half hoped it was a command from the elder to abandon Silk. She handed it over, and he found out it was indeed a request to leave, but it hadn't been from the elder.

"It looks like someone wrote you a novel," Nabru said, leaning over his shoulder and glancing at the letter. "I'd help you through it, if I could read."

Talporom sighed as his eyes crawled over the page. He did not explain to her the complex translational potential of this particularly dense message, he just read through what appeared to be an essay about midcentury architecture, picking out what he needed and discarding the rest. To an untrained eye, it was indeed an impenetrable disquisition on battlements, pillars and rafters. But the real message it contained was fairly simple to decipher. Talporom almost wished it had not been.

 _Your daughter is missing. Suspect she was held up in Capital. Meet me in Oldcastle. You know where to find me. Palo._

By the date, Palo had sent the letter a little more than a week prior. He had made no mention of whether the royal child had been successfully delivered from the city, if Link was missing as well, or any instructions from Elder Merel. It was just like him, to eschew crucial details—perhaps he thought it would impel Talporom to hurry, if only to get the information Palo had neglected to include in his letter. He had to give it to the man, that strategy was working.

Quickly, calmly, Talporom packed his essentials and left. Elpi and Sheim had wished him luck and sent him off, but Nabru had followed him to the edge of town, entreating him to stay. He couldn't blame her. Even if he hadn't been as effective an ally as he'd intended, she was smart enough to know they needed all the help they could get.

"So you're just going to piss off, just like that?" she asked. "You're one of the only competent people here."

"You have Sheim and Elpi," he'd said.

"Two out of three won't cut it. Have you been listening to those little boys up there? Fighting like children, screaming at one another over nothing while our sisters in Onrago and Obra Garud suffer."

He turned and found himself eye-level with her breasts, so he raised his gaze to her face, trying to put on a stern, fatherly look. He wondered if he could pull off talking down to someone so tall. "Keep trying, Nabru. If you must be the glue that holds that gaggle of Ahnadib's sons together, so be it. If you must be the force that tears them apart for the good of your cause, so be it. If you must retake your country alone, do it. You may fail, you may fall apart, but for all the gods' sakes, it's better than resigning to your fate."

She reeled, evidently not having expected such a tirade. But Talporom knew a woman such as her, who had crawled her way from the gutters of Obra Garud, out of prison, through Wormhaven and up into the benevolent shadow of the desert's most powerful plutocrat, should know the value of desperation. She should know the value of undue perseverance, of spitting in the face of impossibility.

"I'd like you to turn around and deliver a speech just like that to those morons up there."

"You can do it for me, I've no doubt," he said. "Just grab their heads and smash them against one another until a good idea falls out. I know you can."

She shook her head. "You think too much of me, Sheikah Talporom."

"I think as little or as much of you as you deserve. Now get back up there and keep that shit show together."

She smiled almost sadly. "As you command, sir." She gave him a salute (one he was never sure whether he should consider complimentary or obscene), and watched him go.

He secured a horse, saddled up, and stole from the city as afternoon crept toward the west. The east side of the valley glowed a hellish red in the setting sun, and the city of Silk itself shone right along with it, a beacon of pearly pink and gold against the red-brown rocks. He didn't linger to watch night fall, as so many lovers from the area liked to do—he just rode on, kicking up dust in his wake, eager to get to Oldcastle as quickly as possible.

The journey across Hyrule was stressful but uneventful. He tore across the fields of Lanayru undeterred, allotting mere hours a day for him and his horse to rest and eat. When he finally saw the broken towers and walls of Oldcastle rise in the distance, his horse was so haggard he doubted even the most desperate of thieves would bother to steal it. Talporom himself was hardly better—his old knees creaked in protest when he dismounted, his backside and legs were so sore he could barely walk properly. But he strode through the crowded streets of Oldcastle nonetheless, avoiding the gazes of bearded men looking to fight, the probing hands of children looking for money, invitations shouted from the windows of gambling dens and brothels. Before he reached the slave market grounds, he trotted into the shadows of what had once been a lovely temple dedicated to Hylia. Its wide front doors had been removed, half of its ceiling and all of its windows had been blown away in the Conquest War, and under the ribs of the buttresses a colorful market had sprung. In its ancillary chapels and passages shopkeepers sold their wares, and beneath the nave, in a basement that once protected (or failed to protect) citizens during the siege of Castletown, lurked the city's seediest gambling den.

Talporom wandered blindly through the thick, opaque haze of smoke, until he saw a familiar shock of light hair. Palo sat alone in the corner of the place, shuffling and reshuffling a deck of cards absentmindedly. When Talporom sat across from him, he flattened the cards and slipped them to the side of the table.

"Took you long enough," he said. "I've been here for days. Already won three hundred thirty-two gold and a stranger's wife."

"Well then, where are they?" Talporom asked with a sigh.

"I lost them again. I told you, I've been here for a while." Palo shifted in his seat and dropped a leather bag on the table. Something that looked like a plain ceramic egg rolled out of it and came to a stop at Talporom's elbow. "I had enough time to pick us up some toys. Flares, poisons… That one there is a smoke bomb—one of the better kinds."

It worried Talporom a little to see all this excess. "What exactly happened to Impa that we need all this?"

"No idea." Palo carefully placed the little bomb back inside the bag. "She never showed up in Old Riko. Never sent a letter detailing why. Link's gone missing too."

"And what of the…" Talporom quieted himself in case of listening ears, but Palo beat him there.

"Fine. The little squirt and her family are safe and sound in Kakariko."

"And so Elder Merel sent you to find Impa?"

"Merel… didn't exactly send me." At Talporom's frustrated look, he continued. "But she didn't explicitly forbid me, either."

"You didn't even bother to tell her, did you?" Talporom pinched his brow. "Palo… I know we've had this discussion before, but you _do not_ run off on a mission without the elder's knowledge. You're a grown man, you should know this."

"Guess the lesson didn't sink in."

"How do you know Impa hasn't already sent Merel a letter with an explanation? She could've sent it weeks ago and you would've missed it because you couldn't help getting ahead of yourself." If Talporom didn't know better, he would've accused Palo of envy, of disrespecting the elder and taking off because he couldn't stand to see Link by Impa's side instead of himself. Talporom had spent too much time watching Talm and Impa compete for his attention to mistakenly think that jealousy could only spring from lust. "With Bloodletter at her side, she's probably fine," he said.

Palo folded his hands across the table and leaned in. "She doesn't have Bloodletter. She didn't take it to the Capital with her." Talporom's heart sank a little at that. "Worse yet, she doesn't have her harp."

"Now that, I can't believe." Even when she only had a mundane lyre she rarely went anywhere without it.

"She sent it in the wagon with the family."

"So she fully intended to come home." He crossed his arms. "I suppose we can eliminate the possibility she eloped with him." Not that he truly entertained that thought in the first place; Impa was too dutiful, too dedicated. She would never abandon their cause for a young lover, man or woman, Hylian or otherwise.

Palo laughed bitterly. "If she ran off with him, she would've at least taken her harp with her."

"All right. So clearly she was delayed against her will. It could've happened anywhere between the Capital and Old Riko."

"It could've. But if it happened outside the city, I guarantee it's nothing to worry about. She might've just lost Link in the bushes or something. But if the situation really is bad, the likeliest place for things to turn sour would be in the King's backyard. They've got all sorts of troublemakers out there. The royalists, the guard, I heard they've even got something of a Knights of Hylia club started there—"

"They wouldn't have interfered," Talporom muttered.

"You never know. Never trust a Hylian with a sword and pure intentions."

Talporom's mind wandered, inadvertently, to Link. "Perhaps I never should have."

"Yeah, well, we should see if we can find her in the city. She's supposed to be staying in one of Sheim's old mouseholes."

Talporom pressed his fingers to his temples and sighed. "We should at least tell the elder what we're doing."

"She probably already knows."

Talporom couldn't disagree. He stood, and Palo slipped his pack over his shoulder and followed him through the thick smoke. "The best case scenario is we go to the city, find them both unharmed and Impa gives us a stern talking-to for our impetuosity."

"And the worst?"

Talporom shook his head. "I'd rather not imagine it."

"Right. You lead the way, and I'll be back here doing the imagining for you."

"Just don't get too creative." As Talporom led Palo out of the church and into the smoky street, he prayed silently that whatever heinous situations the deadseer could think up did not also pass through the minds of the capricious gods.

Oldcastle was abustle, as usual, with nefarious sellers and buyers of all things. It was a common saying that if something exists, it could be bought in Oldcastle. Talporom knew where they could find traveling papers, permits to enter the Capital, and disguises to match. He did not have much gold in his pocket, but he was sure some counterfeiter or another from around here owed him a favor.

"Look out," Palo said quietly, nudging Talporom's elbow. "Those assholes are trying to make eye contact."

A trio of armored men, glittering far too cleanly for their surroundings, turned their heads to watch the two Sheikah go by. Though they did not sport the right hand of Hylia on their capes, there was no mistaking them for Knights.

"I didn't know there were so many of them this far north," Palo sighed. "They're spreading like termites."

"And no doubt they think the same of us," Talporom said. _Though we are more like cockroaches to them, unwilling to die even after the Ordish boot stomps on us._

"Well," Palo shrugged, "evidently we've stared too long." The Knights, apparently taking the passing look as an invitation for a confrontation, strode toward them, hands on sword hilts. The tallest one, perhaps the leader, gave them a not-so-friendly smile as they approached.

"Sheikah," he said, as if it weren't obvious. "I haven't seen you around here before." Talporom could see Palo's hand reach steadily for his knife, but the Knight did not seem too interested in violence. "Hopefully you're planning to head home to the mountains soon."

Talporom looked to Palo, and narrowed his eyes. "No."

"Then I'll say this as a friendly warning. Watch yourself. The King's men have been scrambling around Lanayru, looking for your kind."

"They're always looking for our kind," Palo said.

"So stay off the main road, if you know what's good for you."

Talporom almost laughed. As if the Sheikah weren't used to subterfuge, to staying hidden and traveling in the shadows of the land. He wondered how Ordishmen could hold two such contradictory images of Sheikah at once: so crafty, and yet apparently stupid. "We will keep that in mind," Talporom said.

"A simple thank-you would suffice," said one of the younger men, tapping his fingers on his pommel. "Unless you have something else to say."

The eldest one raised an eyebrow, wearing an almost expectant scowl. Talporom could sense Palo holding himself back. He could almost see a thousand punchlines rushing through the deadseer's head. _Don't make a joke, Palo. Whatever you do, do not open your mouth._

Talporom was saved from debasing himself before the Knights (or having Palo start a fight), by a thick arm, which wrapped quickly—and absurdly strongly—around his shoulders. He glanced up to see an unfamiliar woman, holding him and an equally surprised Palo close, wide smile on her wide face.

"Well! It's my dearest cousins!" she said. "I've been searching half the damn world for you."

Talporom and Palo looked at one another but knew better than to speak up.

"Who are you?" a younger Knight asked. "Are you Sheikah too?"

"What? I'm a sixty-fourth everything. One drop of every which way what have you." She laughed heartily. "Gerudo, Sheikah, Ordish, Faronian, plainsman, hillman, even Zora if my old nan's stories are right."

The older man crossed his arms. "I did not mean to harass your cousins, Telma. We'll be on our way." He turned, leaving Talporom and Palo in the arms of the stranger.

But when the woman readjusted herself, gripping Talporom by the shoulders and looking him over, he found she was apparently no stranger at all.

"Talporom!" she said, wide smile revealing a small, undeniably familiar gap between her two front teeth. "I haven't seen you since the War. So much has changed, good gods, it's been so long!"

"It… clearly has," Talporom said. "Forgive me, but—" Suddenly, recognition dawned on him, and he grinned. "Ah, yes, the world's greatest barkeep. It's good to see you alive."

"After all the mischief I've gotten myself into, I'm surprised I _am_ alive," she laughed. "But the authorities haven't caught up with me yet. We move every once in a while. New bar, new name, you know how it is." She nudged him, lowering her voice to a whisper. "And it helps that the guards are looking for a wayward axeman and not a friendly barmaid."

Talporom laughed. "I suspect it does help. I hope you're keeping well, Telma."

"I'm managing. The Last Resort is still going strong. We've got a few Knights for patrons, now, just a sign of the times changing, I guess."

"I'm surprised you can abide them."

"They're not so bad. Just kick 'em when they say anything stupid."

"Your legs must be tired, then," Palo said.

"Oh, haha! Who's the kid, Tal?"

"This is Palo. Palo, Telma. We go a long way back."

"So what brings you here?" Telma asked.

"Looking for my daughter."

"Sweet gods, Talporom, you have a daughter?"

"Two. You haven't happened to have any Sheikah pass by your place, have you?"

"Only one. About yea tall, short hair." Palo and Talporom looked at one another. "Friends with Ahnadib's kids. Had a Hylian boy with her."

"That's her," Talporom said, heart rising.

"Haven't seen her in weeks." His face must've fallen, since Telma bit her lip. "I haven't been in the Capital in a while, though. I've been down here buying some of the stronger—and less legal—stuff, heh. But I'll help you get through the gates. The King's men are on the lookout for Sheikah."

"We've heard."

"Well, just stay in my shadow and I'll waltz you right through." Telma laughed. "Or I can show you my newest project. Not even Sheim knows about this one yet."

"Project?" Talporom asked.

"Tell me, Talporom," Telma said with a mischievous smile. "Have you ever been in the catacombs?"

* * *

"What happened to Nadiba?"

The King glanced over at Link, folding his hands behind his back, wrinkling the black and gold sigil embroidered on his cloak.

When Link had woken earlier that morning, he'd found food and a new set of clothes waiting for him, and sometime later, the King himself, ready for the day's diplomacy. He had followed the King out onto the battlements over the yards in silence, trying to hide his still-discernible limp. Ganondorf had said something meaningless about the weather, and Link had half-listened, mind occupied with trying to guess where the day would take him. The King appeared willing to waste some time on him again today, though he professed to being quite busy with the affairs of annexing the Gerudo Territories. He had led Link along the paths above the castle grounds, walking him through the basics of appointing ambassadors, quelling rebellions and drafting treaties and laws. But Link couldn't compel himself to even feign interest; he was still trying to parse through what the King had shown him the day before.

"Why do you ask about Nadiba?" Ganondorf said.

Link glanced down over the ramparts to the stable grounds below. "I was… just wondering why she's only in one painting." Somewhere behind them, a little white fox followed in the shadows—neither of them bothered to shoo it, accepting that Barudi would do as she wished. But Link couldn't help the shiver that ran up his spine when he knew the fox looked at him.

The King stood in silence for a moment. "At fifteen she renounced her name and forfeited any claim to the throne she may have had. She fled to Faron and disappeared completely. Ganond never found her. Word is she died somewhere in the Lostwood. There's a common story in Faron that if you walk too far into the woods you will meet her ghost. If you stare at the specter too long, she'll lead you astray and you'll never find your way again." The King chuckled hatefully. "Leave it to southern Faronians to concoct a story like that. They are so far from the Capital and any place of import the only member of the royal family that would deign to visit them is a dead one."

"Why did she go to Faron?" Link asked. He did not need to ask a reason for her running away at all—he couldn't imagine what it would be like to live with a father that excused himself from the dinner table every few days to run to the town square and slowly, publicly dismember a political prisoner.

"Why that province in particular?" Ganondorf asked, and Link nodded. "I don't know. Rumors abounded after the Uprising that Nadiba had fallen for a Faronian boy, a son of one of the rebels, and ran off with him. Some theorized that she herself was a bastard child of one of its leaders, raised as a princess because Ganond was too proud to admit his enemy had seduced his wife. I do not know how many of these lies she had heard, or what she believed. Perhaps she fled to Faron to look for a family she never had." The King eyed Link for a moment. "I suppose you do not know where your family is from."

He shook his head.

"You are probably better off that way. Children that end up as palace servants never come from good places. It's almost a mercy when they're sold to the Crown. More often than not it's their own parents doing the selling."

Link tried to imagine his mother—with Irma's face but his own blond hair, shouting in the market at Oldcastle, holding her child high and naming her price. If he had no blemishes and looked healthy enough, he supposed he might've gone for a decent price—his buyers might not have known he was deaf at the time of purchase.

"I would argue you were lucky to have ended up where you did," Ganondorf said. "It used to be that anyone with enough money could buy a slave from the markets at Oldcastle. The trade was a booming industry in Ganond's time, but Garona wouldn't stand for it. She tried to abolish it altogether, but there was so much money in the trade and its proponents so powerful she could only make a compromise. She said she'd take the moral burden on herself and spare the rest of the land the gods' judgment. Now only the Crown is allowed to buy slaves, and only under the ethical code she drafted."

The King approached the battlements overlooking the stables, folding his arms and leaning against the stone to get a better view of the activity below. Link could see familiar stablehands shoveling and scraping, brushing and cleaning—he saw their mouths move but could not hear the content of their idle conversation. He thought he spied Gorman, wandering under the shadows of the stable, hunched like a stalking cat.

"The stablemen treated you well, did they not?"Ganondorf asked. "They weren't allowed to do otherwise."

"I… I suppose so." Link's fingers curled around the stone as he watched the day proceed in the yard. Free in the corral, Epona paced as she often did, but there seemed to be something off about her, a nervousness in her step. She shook her head and dug her hooves into the dirt, as if trying to unearth something she had lost.

"She knows you are near," the King said. "I have little doubt she misses you."

Link leaned over the battlements beside the King, intertwining his fingers so his monarch would not see his hands shake. A painful curiosity sparked in his head, and he felt a desperate breath expand at the back of his throat. He wet his lips, pushed his tongue against his teeth and released a whistle. The stablehands below did not turn their heads; Link supposed that far down the wall only Epona and maybe some of the nearby hounds could hear it—or at least cared to. Even the King seemed unperturbed by the high-pitched whistle.

But Epona heard, and remembered. She lifted her head at his distressed call, and seeing him far out of reach, quickened her fervent pacing. She prodded the workers with her nose, kicked up dirt and whipped her tail, as if overcome with impatience. Link had never seen her act so ill at ease—even in her worst moments, she would merely make a gesture or two, twist an ear in discontent. She did not throw a tantrum like a human child, at least not when he was around. Perhaps the stress of warfare had changed her in some way.

The King watched the horse carefully for a moment, only turning away when a stablehand rushed out to calm her, and started to pull her back toward the stalls. "The good stableman Talon has missed you as well. Did you know he was the one who made us aware of your presence in the city?"

"Haema told me."

The King continued along the battlements, toward the eastern side of the castle. Behind them, the sounds of Epona's anxiety faded in the air, replaced with the nearing sounds of the gardens. Link listened to the wind through leaves and the shallow gurgling of fresh water, and in the distance, he could smell flowers—though even the strongest petals and pollens could not completely overpower the ubiquitous stench of the city factories. "Would you like to see him?" the King asked suddenly.

"See… Talon?" He stopped in his tracks, soft wind brushing his hair away from his wide eyes. _Remember what he is trying to do_. The words were Link's own thoughts, but they echoed with Impa's stern inflections. _Do not let him tempt you into complaisance._

"Yes," he answered, despite the voice. The mere possibility of seeing the man once more, even with the knowledge of his accidental betrayal, burned through Link's heart almost like fear. He imagined Talon's wrinkled blue eyes, his solicitous frown, the way his mustache obscured his lip when he smiled. "Yes… but I shouldn't."

"And why not?"

Link thought of all the stories Talon would tell himself when he saw him, dressed in such finery, in the shadow of the Hyrulean King, face hardened and scarred, with all his mundane senses and a history of subversion. How unfamiliar must Link be to him now? The man who stood beside the King, who had traversed Molgera's domain and fought at Obra Garud was certainly not the boy he had known. He would be a stranger to him, concealed in strange circumstances.

The King's impatient look pulled Link from his pessimistic reverie. "I… I don't know," he answered.

"Well, if you do not wish it, I will not summon him. He is very much distracted with his newly-acquired wealth as it is." At least it seemed Haema had told Link the truth about the Crown remunerating Talon for his loyalty. In truth, he did not know how to feel about his own capture having such a generous reward. "He does not even work at the stables anymore," the King continued. "He doesn't need to. Of course, he may come by when he wishes, and from what I hear he does, often. But he no longer has any reason to concern himself with the duties of a servant."

Link did not know whether to silently berate or congratulate Talon on his success. Instead he just marched beside his King, silent, eyes lowered. He descended a set of stairs from the castle's practical battlements to the ornate catwalks of brass and iron that circumvallated the palace gardens. From here he could get a better view of all the dignitaries, all the lords and ladies doing whatever it was lords and ladies did under the graceful shade of blooming trees.

"I am going to extend you an offer, stableboy," the King said. "And you do not have to accept it. But I'll warn you, if you don't, you will not get this opportunity again."

Link gulped. The King's eyes were trained far below them, on a pink cherry tree standing squat yet proud in a small arrangement of stones. At the edges of his frown Link saw the wrinkles of serious discontent, as if he were doubting himself. He almost laughed aloud—the King, doubting himself—what a preposterous idea.

"I will be wholly honest with you—as always. I am offering you the chance to live your life to its full extent, with full protection, in luxury. You will never go hungry, you will always have shelter and a soft bed, you will never want for pleasure or amusement. But you will not leave the castle grounds. You will obey every order you're given, by myself, your Queen, or Haema, and you will speak to no one about the golden power of the gods, under any circumstance. If you prove your loyalty, I may allow you to leave the grounds, but that is in the far future." The King turned, gaze settling on Link's wide eyes. "You are surprised at such a generous offer. You think me a tyrant, incapable of mercy. But do not mistake me for Ganond. I am not him."

Words of warning flew through Link's thoughts like banners: _Do not let him tempt you. Whatever he wants, do not give it to him_. But he thought of his cell, about the horrible darkness and unbearable solitude, and about the fruit by the washtub, the pleasure of a full stomach and of a warm bed. "If… if I do what you want," he started, "will you let Impa go?"

The King frowned thoughtfully. "A reasonable proposal, on its surface. But if I release her, she will no doubt return, won't she? She will return to rescue you, and dethrone me, to sow unrest and rebellion in my kingdom. She does not seem the type who will crawl silently away in defeat." He narrowed his eyes at Link's grimace. "I see by the look on your face the thought did not cross your mind. You know her better than I, so you understand why I cannot release her."

"So… will you kill her?"

"Not unless you force my hand."

Again, the King had slipped around Link's inquisitions about Impa, and left him with nothing. Ganondorf looked down at him from his high ground, narrowing his eyes.

"If you accept, you will get what I have promised you. Life and leisure, protection and, I will be honest with you, complete confinement. Of course, you have every right to refuse. But if you do, I can only promise you a very different future." He let go of the intricate iron balustrade and continued his path along the outside of the garden, Link limping quickly in his shadow. "If you refuse, you will return to your cell and you will stay there for the rest of your life. I've seen stronger men than you go insane down in the dark, so be thankful for this foray. Be mindful that if you refuse, this is the last glimpse of the outside world you will get. Take advantage of your senses now, for you will have little opportunity to use them again. You will not see the sky again, or feel the breath of the wind. You will see no one—not me, not Impa, not anyone, ever again. Except for, perhaps, Barudi."

The King's smile made Link's hair stand on end. He turned away, glancing at his sore feet, and folded his hands. "If Barudi cuts out my heart and offers it to her gods… then all your effort to keep me alive is wasted."

"Ah, but you can live without your eyes. And your tongue. She has expressed a great interest in both." The King laughed at the look on Link's face. "Is that what you want? To live out the rest of your life alone and blind, without your tongue? Are you prepared to suffer like that, solely for the sake of spiting me? I should hope not, unless you are quite fond of darkness and solitude."

As they approached a large door wrought in intricate iron, Link raised his eyes to the sky. He watched a lone cloud struggle across the endless blue, and his mind turned over itself rapidly. If this was the last image of the sky he'd get, he might as well memorize it.

"Well?" The King stood with his back to the door, watching Link closely. It appeared he expected him to make his decision here and now, having only been introduced to the consequences—not an ideal situation in which to think clearly about his answer.

"You want an answer now?" Link's voice trembled as badly as his hands. He tried desperately to pinpoint Ganondorf's strategy. _How could he possibly benefit from this offer?_ he asked himself. _Think. Just think, he's tricking you somehow. He has to be._

The King must've seen his eyes dart back and forth, must've seen his wavering look, his shaking fingers, must've felt the frantic beating of his heart in his throat. "Rumor has it your greatest asset is your courage. Yet here you are, trembling like a child before an obvious decision. Think quickly, boy. I don't have all day."

Images passed through his mind: the oppressive darkness of the nearby dungeon, the possibility he would lay on that floor for the rest of his life, eating nothing but tasteless grey gruel, having nothing to look forward to but painful trips to the chamberpot, having his wounds heal and reopen, heal and reopen until he lay down and closed his eyes for the last time. He imagined no stimulation but the occasional visit from Haema, or worse, Barudi. He would never see the sky again, and Impa—

He blinked, struck with a sudden thought. Something seemed to click into place inside his head, though he didn't know why. He did not know if the realization was merely spurred by the panic of his impending decision, or by some insight gifted to him by the gods, but when he raised his eyes to the King's, it made sense to him. Haema's lies, the King's equivocation, the contradictory stories, their refusal to let him see her, the fact they had wrestled no information from her—with each passing second, each passing thought, it seemed more and more likely. They didn't have Impa. They _couldn't_ —it was the only thing that made sense to him now.

To him, she had been dead, then alive, then both. Here and gone, a ghost, a confusion. She was nothing to them but a threat, an empty threat to keep him silent and obedient, he could see that now. She must've escaped into the crowd that day beneath the gates, she must've disappeared into the shadows of the city and found her way back to their hiding place. She had no excuse _not_ to—she had plenty of cover, and Link had provided more than enough of a distraction. No doubt while the guards had been gathering around the man who fell, focusing on his capture, she had easily escaped back into obscurity. Easily.

It was as she had told him months ago, over a small piece of coded paper on their makeshift table. Deception could be surprisingly simple. How could he not have trusted her to escape? How could he have even thought to trust Haema, to believe him when he told him he'd cut her up and fed her to the dogs? How could he have been stupid enough to believe all the contradictory stories, all at once?

He swallowed loudly, solidifying his decision. He could be wrong, of course—he could always be wrong, but if he could take advantage of this rare opportunity, if he could ride on the back of the King's mercy to survive, it might not matter if he was wrong or right. In his mind, Impa was safe—perhaps not happy, perhaps plotting this very moment to rescue him from the King's clutches, perhaps even now lingering above them somewhere on the roof, waiting, planning. And she would tell him, now, on the precipice of this decision, the obvious answer.

It was not courageous to deny the King, to remain spiteful and waste away in a dungeon. It would not bring results, it would not hurt him alone—but her. He knew he could not waste away in the dark, useless to everyone, nor could he hide himself away to escape the task he now knew had to be done. It was far less cowardly to take a gamble on a game he could not win than to ensure failure by refusing to play.

So he swallowed the lump in his throat and took a breath, solidifying his surety of what he had to do. "I accept."

The King seemed unsurprised. After all, to anyone sane (Link knew at this point he could not be counted among them), the decision was obvious. "Good."

"But now, will you let me see Impa?" Link asked, knowing what, if he were right about his assumptions, the answer would be.

"Maybe."

Link turned from the King, covering a determined smile he couldn't suppress.


	57. The Consequences

"Oh, this quiet violence; this fell stillness,  
This illusion of peace, the bodiless  
Dark-lit spirit of tiresome sanity,  
False specter, crawl from me, and leave me be."

Barti Yonn, from "The Princess of Twilight"

* * *

Link could be a model citizen if he wanted. He could bow and grovel, serve and pay due respect in silence. He could disappear from sight and mind (of course, not completely, since he always had at least one pair of guards trailing after him wherever he went), or shrink himself into something inoffensive and unthreatening. It wasn't difficult for him to combine his Sheikah lessons of stealth and those early habits he'd learned from Talon about how a proper servant should remain unobserved. He sank into the background of the palace, causing no disturbance to the dignitaries and ministers around him. He ate his meals, he slept soundly, he took leisurely walks in the gardens, obeyed the guards when they snapped their spears in front of him, barring him from this or that part of the castle (clearly they had been given a list of allowed and disallowed places he could wander—one of the disallowed places, strangely, was the stables). He did not harass the sand fox that sometimes stalked him during his strolls. He behaved himself marvelously.

And still, he did not see Impa. This was, of course, expected. But he had also not seen the King since he had extended his generous offer, and that had been, if Link counted right, fourteen days ago. The only glimpse he'd gotten of the royal couple had been Barudi's little familiar, and it appeared at the edge of his sight far more often than he'd like. He supposed since he had a history of slipping away under the watch of royal guards, it wouldn't do the King any harm to let his wife keep an eye on him as well. He had to admit she was probably far more capable of preventing his escape, even from the other side of a sand fox, than the two wordless soldiers who followed him around.

It wasn't as if the guards went out of their way to disturb him, but he didn't exactly find it comfortable to have two silent, hulking men following him wherever he went, hovering over him as he slept, standing outside his door as he bathed, presiding over his meals as Irma might (except they never asked him if he liked his food or if they could get him another plate). More than once he'd tried to start a conversation with them but they'd held their silence, staring ahead at something beyond his shoulder. He wondered for a moment if they were deaf, and if this was the King's idea of some sort of joke.

Regardless of his strange company, his constant doubts and worries, he started to regain his strength. When he took his meals alone in his room, he would grip the knife and drive it into his meat as if downing a foe, he would take great mouthfuls of vegetables and generous gulps of wine until the fullness of his stomach pained him. As the days wore on, he found he could walk farther without having to sit, he could hold more food down, he could pull himself up the castle's myriad staircases easily. Which was all well and good, since he would have to have some strength in his muscles if he was going to kill the King and his wife.

Procuring a real weapon was out of the question, of course. There was no way that he'd be able to get away with pilfering an intricate mace from the suits of armor decorating the halls, or successfully overpower his stalwart guardsmen and take their spears. He had considered the possibility of another, potentially more devastating weapon, which may or may not be hovering in the golden chamber of the southwest tower. He carefully considered stealing the artifact, regardless of whether or not he could actually wield it, but when he followed what he guessed to be the mirror image of the route he and the yellow-haired girl had taken at the southeastern tower, he found the way blocked. Every door he theorized would bring him closer to the artifact was locked, and his ever-watchful guards, who had no doubt been informed of the possibility he might try to sneak into the towers, barred the way. He knew that with unprecedented luck and far more skill than he had at his disposal, he might be able to sneak past the men and ascend the tower, but there was no way he could get past that damnable little fox.

No matter where he went, there it was, always spying, always following. It stalked him when he strolled in the gardens, hovered in the corner when he took his meals, and sometimes he'd wake in the middle of the night to see its glowing eyes on the other side of his room. He didn't know how it could possibly slip past the triple-bolted door and the hawk-eyed guards, but he knew Barudi was behind those eyes, taking in his every movement, his every expression. He hadn't seen the witch in person since she had sewed his lips shut and driven her needle into his chest, but it was hardly a relief to have her familiar stalk him in her place. Even if he could escape the notice of his guardsmen, if he could sink into the shadows and by some miracle procure a weapon, even if he could find a route he was sure would lead him to escape, he knew he could not do much while the sharp eyes of the fox were on him. Link did not know if she spied on him because she didn't trust him, because she enjoyed it in some sick way, or because she wanted to ensure his parts stayed intact so that when he slipped up, she would have pristine organs to offer the gods. Perhaps she, like Haema, thought the King's mercy was wasted on him, but the fox did nothing to harm him—it did not even come close enough to touch him. Evidently she had respected her husband's wishes that he be left alone, at least for the time being.

But gods, did that fox love to watch him. He could not even escape it when he bathed. Though there were no windows or doors through which the fox could've possibly crawled, he could always spy its glinting gold eyes through the steam of his tub. Worse yet, his hard-faced attendant (the very same he'd scandalized by eating the potpourri) did not seem to notice. He just did his duty, pouring in soaps and perfumes, asking curtly if there was anything else he needed. The answer was invariably no, at least out loud. Link could not very well ask the man to shoo a magic fox, or to get him a knife or sword with which he might kill their divine sovereign.

At meals his cutlery was closely observed. If a glint of silver shone too fast or too threateningly, his guards would wrestle the knife and fork from him and he would have to eat the remainder with his hands alone. He considered turning the knife of himself more than once—it would be easy to finish chewing, twist it in his hand and jam it into his own throat before his guards could save him. But he thought better of it every time he considered it; he would not do the kingdom, nor Impa, any good by surrendering like that, by passing the burden of rebellion to the next wayward stableboy or revolutionary Faronian woodcutter who would take up arms against his King. No, he would do this—or he would at least try. With Impa (he grew surer by the day) at large and Zelda likely far away in the safe hands of the elder in Kakariko, he had very little to lose.

There were two things he needed: a weapon, and an opportunity. He would prefer to have them in that order, but he was close to acknowledging he would never actually acquire the first. That was all right, for now. If he could wriggle his way back into the King's presence somehow, he might start walking with him again, might invite him back into his company, might trust him enough to get close. After all, the man had said in the desert that he enjoyed their strolls—even though that had only been because the King had assumed he couldn't hear, and was therefore a good keeper of secrets. The King had been quite open with him during their conversations—if Link could just get him to lower his guard again, he might have some chance of success.

The next problem became how to get himself invited into a King's presence. He thought a request for an audience may work, although it was well known that securing one was a near impossibility. He didn't know with whom he should speak, or how long he would have to wait, or even, he had to admit to himself, what an audience _was_. He didn't know what it entailed, how it could possibly go, or if at this point in their adversarial relationship, the King would be insulted Link would choose so formal an avenue to address him.

Another surefire way to get himself thrown before his King was to act out—and that method contained infinite possibilities. He could sprint naked and screaming through the public gardens, he could take a candle to the curtains in his room, he could grab Barudi's fox and swing it by the tail through the nearest window. But he knew that if the guards did not stop him in time, which they surely would, Ganondorf would rescind his offer and send him back down to his dark cell. Then everything he'd worked for, everything he'd planned, would come to naught. Clearly the first option was the more viable.

So that night, when he lay down in the dark and folded his hands across his chest, he thought deeply about the possibilities. He could corner some dignitary or another in the palace gardens, ask him where he could request an audience—that might work, if they did not brush him off first. He could ask his two guards, but he knew they would not answer. He could compose a letter and request for it to be delivered to the King, or whoever organized his postal affairs. Or, if he was brave enough, he could go find Haema—he hadn't seen the man for weeks, thank the gods above, but rumor had it he was always in the training grounds, beating down the new recruits. He imagined walking up to the man, stepping over the heaps of moaning rookies, and demanding Haema to take him to the King.

He laughed mirthlessly in the dark. His voice carried across the small room, absorbed by the silver draperies, rebounding off the thick window and locked door. When he heard a noise in the farthest corner, wholly separate from his cynical chuckle, he shut his mouth and lifted his head. Stirring in the shadows was the little fox, to no one's surprise. But an idea struck him that garnered his immediate favor.

He pushed himself up onto one elbow. "You, fox," he said. The animal turned its head and yawned before licking its chops in contentment. He could see his own moonlit image in the golden orbs of its eyes, clearer than glass. "Get Barudi to tell the King I want to see him." The creature tilted its head, perking up one semi-transparent ear. "Any time will do," Link finished, because he did not know what else to say. The fox stared at him for a little while longer, as if parsing through his words; then it rested its head between its white paws and closed its eyes.

Link sank back into the sheets, turning to his side and folding his hands under his ear (the intact ear—though healed, he still could not sleep comfortably on the one Haema had split under his boot). He could only hope the little animal understood him—if Barudi was watching him through its eyes, then it might. But he wondered if she had any incentive at all to deliver the message, or if the King had any incentive to respond to it. He doubted it.

His doubts proved less than accurate. Within three days the King answered his request in the form of a sour-faced messenger, all spectacles and tweed overcoat, knocking angrily at his door. The guards opened it and the messenger almost tumbled inside, averting his eyes when he saw Link struggling to get into his trousers.

"His majesty expects you in his chambers within a quarter of an hour," he said. His gaze remained fixed on the window—he seemed to redirect his eyes not out of modesty or respect, but disgust. Link supposed the scars on his body were prominent enough to be noticeable, but he didn't think they were worthy of such contempt. "I will lead you there when you are properly dressed."

Link threw on his undershirt, buttoned his waistcoat and pulled on the day's decorative cloak—a bold red, quite different from his usual repertoire of inoffensive greens and browns. He pulled on his shining black boots, buckled his cuffs, tightened his collar and met the messenger outside his door.

The guardsmen, of course, followed them down the hall. The messenger said nothing—the closest thing he got to conversation was a small sound of disdain when Link nearly tripped up the first step in the King's long staircase. He tried to recall his first journey up to the King's chambers, and despite having been blind the last time, he thought he might recognize the curve in the hall, the height of each step, the lush depression of carpet underfoot.

 _So much has changed since then,_ he thought. _And yet not much at all. Still flanked by guards, still imprisoned—just a little better-fed._ He also now had something crucial he did not have then: a sense of direction.

As they had last time, the guards shoved him inside the King's chambers and shut the door behind him, retreating into the hall, as ordered. But this time Link was not bound by fetters, he was not weak and surprised and newly injured. This time would not be like the last.

He dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground—still a natural motion for him. When the King bid him lift himself, he stood, brushing off his trousers and surveying the room around him.

It was the same as it had been when he'd last visited—polished floors, fiery hearth, ornate, curved chairs, the smell of incense and perfumes. Even the fox was where it'd been the first time, curled in front of the flames with one yellow eye open. The King sat in the same spot, but Barudi had moved—she now stretched across a chaise by the fire, near her fox. Link did not dare take in a good view of her, since he knew if his eyes accidentally met hers, he was in for some unpleasantry. He just lifted his gaze to the King, ignoring the first bead of sweat that formed around his temple.

"Do you not find your situation to your liking?" the King growled. "Why have you come to me?" He could tell the man was displeased with his visitation—perhaps Link had interrupted something, or inconvenienced him in some way. Link swallowed the lump in his throat and grit his teeth. This was already off to an inauspicious start.

The morning sun backlit the King's hair like fire, burned across his crown so bright Link could barely look at it. Despite the King's sour tone, he plowed on anyway, telling himself to muster the courage to say what he'd rehearsed in his head dozens of times in the past few days. "I came, your majesty, to ask if you have already taken a new squire."

Link could tell the smile that spread across the King's face, wide and toothy, was not entirely under his control. "Ah. I knew you did not make your way up all those stairs merely because you pined for my company." Even Barudi, from her place across the room, smiled (Link could not see it, of course, but he could feel its discomfiting, knowing heat). "The answer is no. I have not."

Link addressed his feet, "So I…"

"Spit it out," the King said. He knew perfectly well what Link was to ask next, but he seemed to revel in the suspense, as if stretching the moment was like spreading butter over bread.

"I know I am not worthy," Link started. "I know I have been disloyal, I know I have done harm to the Crown, but… if… if you would consider me…" He almost left it there, but the look on the King's face forced him to continue. "I would serve you until death, I would do your every bidding, I would stay and fight at your side—"

"Give that boy a sword and he will cut you with it, my love." Barudi's deep voice overpowered his own, both in volume and in veracity. The bead of sweat forming at Link's temple made its way coldly to his chin.

"Of course he will," the King said. "But this possibility intrigues me. Could you imagine… hah. It is almost too good. So why the offer all of a sudden? Are you not satisfied with your service already?"

"Sire… I want to serve you better."

"Do not lie to me, boy. What do you expect from me?"

Both knew what Link would request, but the King seemed to want to hear him say it. He was proving no fool—although Link hadn't anticipated him to. "I want you to give Impa what you gave me. I want her to have a bed, to have proper food. I want her to be able to walk in the gardens and see the sky. I'll do anything you ask of me."

"If you let the Sheikah walk free," Barudi hissed, "they will plot your demise together."

"They would indeed." The King's smile was mirthless, bitter. "And what would you do for me? Would you burn down Ordona? Would you bring me the head of the High Prince? All for her?"

"Yes," Link said.

"Then you offer no more than Daroen. And he is the High Prince's second son. He is willing to torch his own land and fight his own family for the cause of unity. And he asks nothing in return. Clearly he is the better choice." Gods damn him, the King was enjoying this. His smile had widened, and he now held a petrified Link at the end of his intense stare like some sort of basilisk. "Do you think me an idiot? You and I are both well aware that the only reason I give you such slack on your leash is because if you misstep, I will kill her. Why should I yield anything to you? I can already end her life on a word."

Link fell back to his knees. He did not have to pretend the desperation, the dread, the regret. "F-forgive me, my King." He pressed his forehead into the marble floor and placed his hands above them.

"You are bold, that is true," the King said. Link could hear a little of that edge, a little of that anger, leave his voice. "I suppose it is because of that courage that I let you live."

"My King, if you wish it," Barudi started, "we can make him swear an unbreakable oath." Both Link and Ganondorf raised curious eyes to her. "It is a simple ritual, but it would ensure he does not betray you if you do allow him to carry a sword in your name."

"What is it, then?" the King asked.

"First, we must cut out his tongue. Then he mouths the words of the oath as if he still has it. Then we make him swallow it. It is an old spell, but reliable. He will never break that oath no matter how he tries."

"It's not as if anyone appreciates a talkative squire." The King lowered his eyes to Link. "How skilled of a swordsman are you?"

"Mediocre," Link admitted.

"What do you know of caring for weaponry, for armor?"

"Not much."

"And do you have a family name?"

"I… no."

"Than what good can you do me? You won't be a valuable fighter, you cannot care for my possessions, you provide no bridge of friendship between my family and another… you are utterly without value."

Link could sense the doubt in the King's words. After all, if Link had the potential to wield some sort of godly power, as Ganondorf suspected, he couldn't be entirely useless. Not quite yet defeated, he dared to venture into self-promotion. "You've seen how I can care for an animal. You yourself praised Epona as the best horse you've ever ridden. I learn quickly, and I even held my own against Haema at Obra Garud—"

"You only did that because Haema was commanded to bring you back to me alive. Had he been free to end you, he would've. No, from what I heard, he was toppled by another soldier—some _giant,_ if my men are to be trusted—who then threw you over her shoulder and carried you to safety." Link bit his lip. "You can do me no service other than what you are now. You have nothing to offer me, so do not presume to come in here and bargain for the life of that Sheikah traitor. I will not reward a woman whose entire clan plots to turn my people against me. It is by the will of the gods, mind you, _the will of the gods themselves_ , that I can extend to you such merciful treatment as I have. If it were not for them, you would've had your head cut off already. So do not disturb me with these requests again. If you so much as mention your Sheikah companion in my presence again, I will hand you over to Barudi for disassembly. Have I made myself clear?"

Link again pressed his forehead to the ground, if only to hide the fear and disappointment on his face. His hands shook as he placed them above his head, and his heart beat thick and heavy in his throat. "Forgive me." He held himself in place, mind churning.

So this was it. This might be his only chance, and it slipped away from him with each passing second. He gulped, opened his mouth to speak, but the King's voice emerged.

"You are dismissed. Begone."

Link's hands clenched at his side as he pulled himself to his feet. His mind raced, his lungs struggled shallowly to draw air. "Sire—if I may offer—"

The King stood, abruptly, voice ringing angrily across the room. "Boy, what have I told you about testing my patience?"

"I can show you the way to Kakariko."

The King stilled for a moment. His eyes stayed locked on Link's, and his nose wrinkled a little. "You'd lead me to that rat's nest… hah. You really are a little traitor."

"I… I know the way," Link said. "If you spare Impa… I'll take you there."

"You'd sacrifice their last stronghold, all to save one of them." He crossed his arms and tilted his head. "Why should I believe you'd do such a thing?"

Link wrung his hands, thinking, gears turning furiously in his head. He needed time, he needed something with which to distract the King before he decided to disbelieve him entirely and shoo him away—or much worse, take him up on his offer. "Sire… it's all because of a question you asked me."

He looked around, at the windows on the far wall, to the ornate tables, the lush tapestries, taking in any and all potential advantages—while earnestly avoiding Barudi's eyes. He glanced to the paintings on the walls, the King standing tall before him (now less angry and more curious), to the fox and the fire.

There he spied something that made his heart leap nearly into his head: a set of wrought iron fire tools, sturdy and long, with thick ends and intricate handles. He knew he shouldn't try, he knew he should wait until he had a better plan, but this seemed an offer of the gods of chance, a gamble on both of their parts. This might be his only opportunity. He remembered what he told himself earlier, when he considered the King's generous offer to let him live in luxurious confinement. It is better to play a game with a slim chance of winning than to ensure failure by not playing at all.

So he stepped toward the fire, folding his hands behind his back, as if he had something worthwhile to say. He stepped around the fox, avoiding Barudi's icy stare, and looked into the flames. For a moment, he thought he saw a face in the heat—some sort of vision, like the images Elder Merel saw in her fire. A face that looked like his own, golden-haired, sad-eyed, yellow shadows like stitches sewn across his lips.

He took a small, surprised breath at the appearance and disappearance of the face—but cleared his throat to cover it up. "You asked me if I know why the worm eats her own tail," he said.

He knew the query had little to do with anything, but it was unexpected enough that it piqued the King's interest. "I did. And have you figured it out?" His voice was charged with curiosity—the speed at which he had switched from hostile to accommodating reminded Link of the heat and cold of Barudi's magic.

"I have had a lot of time to think about it," he said. In truth, he had not considered the matter at all. It was too obscure a question, one not worth answering. He did not have time to bother himself with the philosophical when he had his own survival to worry about. Not to mention Impa's.

"And what is your conclusion?"

Link eyed the tongs and pokers—the nearest was well within reach. If he could just grasp it, perhaps he could—"It took me a long while to come to it," he said. "I came to lots of different answers before that, but none made sense." But who would he leap for first? If he took out the King, Barudi would be at his throat, and he would be paralyzed, held beneath her stare, helpless. "In the desert, I learned a lot about worms. Someone told me that Molgera eats her own tail because she is eternal. She doesn't die, and she's never really born, either." If he killed Barudi first, he would not have the element of surprise on his side, but at least the King could not paralyze him completely with only his stare. Either way, he knew he could not take them both at once, and Barudi was closer, just on the opposite end of the hearth…

"You've certainly happened across the meat of the idea," the King said. "Molgera births her children from her mouth—once in a couple centuries she bears a daughter that is nearly equal in size to herself; it's more of a molt than anything. In that way Molgera is said to give birth to herself." He sounded pleased—Link did not turn to look at his face, his eyes were on the poker nearest him. By their position the only natural way he could pick one up was with his right hand. That was fine, he could switch to his left given the opportunity. Surprise was paramount—hand strength was not.

"At first I thought the idea was only about Molgera," Link continued, slowly. "But Nabru—she's the warrior who saved me in Obra Garud—told me about the cycle of the world. How it is born and reborn, how time loops around like a worm eating her own tail." He lifted his hand as if to scratch his chin. Slowly, it rose from his side, sleeve soaked with sweat, toward the metal instruments. "The world makes and unmakes itself eternally," he concluded.

"You are close," the King said. "But you are missing—"

With a clatter of metal, Link ripped a poker from its stand. He turned on his heel, raised it above his head and launched himself toward Barudi, letting loose a grunt of effort. He pushed off the rug, metal glinting, tip of the bludgeon aiming for the witch's left temple, right where the red streaks of her hair reached her shining crown.

Their eyes met. That familiar, terrible cold jolted through Link's limbs, but he did not stop—he solidified his trajectory, muscles burning, hand hot against the grip of the poker. He opened his mouth to cry out, to give voice to the determination, the sheer stupidity, but when he pushed the air from his lungs and grit his teeth, he could hear nothing. He flew toward her, clutching his bludgeon, imagining the tip splitting her head, focusing on nothing but the image of metal meeting skull. Barudi just sat in silence, fighting him with her stare, shielding herself with her oracular smile. The space between them seemed to grow with each passing moment; he moved too slowly, as if in a half-sleeping haze, but he did not hesitate, he did not freeze.

A sudden and debilitating pain sprang from his leg into the rest of him. He didn't look—he couldn't, not with his eyes stuck on Barudi—but he could feel teeth sink into his skin, he could feel the incisors pierce his muscle, and he knew the fox had latched onto him. But he did not let the animal deter him; he just threw himself all the harder at Barudi, vision darkening around everything but his target. He powered through the ice-cold pain in his chest and the terrible stinging of his leg, falling toward her with his iron weapon raised. All he knew is that if he could get to her, if the tip of his bludgeon could strike her head, she would fall like any other mortal woman—she _had_ to—and he would be free to—

A hand gripped his own. From nowhere, the King swept behind him, grasping his wrist and pulling him back, back away from Barudi, away from any hope he had of freeing himself from her. The King twisted him around, fox still attached and wriggling on his calf. With one hand he held Link's wrist, with the other he ripped the poker from his grasp, throwing it behind him with a hopeless clang. As the King yanked him away from Barudi, Link could make out every straining muscle in his clenched jaw, every wrinkle in his snarling lip. He had never seen such an ireful look on the King's face—even when he had killed his little Gerudo assassin, he wore a kinder face, a face not so shadowed with rage.

"How _dare_ you." His voice rumbled deep, almost unearthly, like the growl of distant thunder. He twisted Link's hand in his, sending waves of staggering pain through his tendons and muscles. Link struggled against the King's weight, but it forced him down, pushing on his fingers, torquing his aching joints. He couldn't stop himself from gasping and wriggling, but the King did not relent, he just stared into Link's face with unprecedented fury, squeezing tighter, and tighter, twisting—

A resounding crack tore a cry of pain from Link's throat. A pillar of numbness jolted its way down his forearm to his elbow, tingling along skin and bone. He tried to pull his hand out of the King's, struggling with his left to pry his right out of that impossible grip, but he could only wiggle it uselessly as thick fingers tightened around his. Another twist, another crack—and Link's knees gave out. But the King held him there, dangling and squirming, as he readjusted his large fingers. The sharp pain in Link's leg relented as the fox released him, but what little comfort he found in that was overshadowed by another clear snap as another bone in his hand split under the preternatural strength of the King's grip.

"After all I've done for you—after all I've offered you." Link's free hand scraped uselessly at the King's wrist—a throbbing ache, heavy and laden with pained blood, replaced the frightening numbness in his arm. "Haema was right, as usual; you have proved nothing but a traitorous, thankless bastard." To emphasize his final word, the King broke another bone, perhaps a finger, perhaps something else—Link could not feel enough of his hand to know exactly where the pain began and ended. "You would use these hands to harm your Queen. They must go."

When Ganondorf finally dropped Link, he fell to the floor, curling in pain. He gripped his right elbow, not daring to squeeze any higher up, and blinked at his unreal, mangled hand. His mouth hung open uselessly, spewing wheezes of agony.

"You are truly an ungrateful little shit, aren't you?" the King said. He watched Link squirm at his feet and shook his head. "Not fit to call yourself a stain on my boot. This is what the gods give you when you show mercy. So I will have none. You will lose your hands, and your Sheikah friend will lose her head."

Link tried to lift his face, tried to push out a question, starting and stopping and starting again, stuttering through the agony. "Y-you h-have her—you d-didn't—" Despite his best efforts to control his breath and the tears streaming from his eyes, he couldn't get through his query. It was his luck the King was a skilled interpreter of unusual expressions. The monarch hovered over him a moment, assessing Link's wide-eyed surprise, before the thought struck him.

"Ah, so _that's_ what spurred this indignity. You thought we didn't have her?" The King threw back his head and released a cruel laugh. "Only because I did not let you see her? My, the gods have certainly not chosen you for your wisdom." He knelt beside Link, traces of his laughter still twitching on his lips. "You have made a mistake. A horrible one. But you will learn a valuable lesson about mistakes. You will be rid of those treasonous hands of yours, and she her treasonous head." He lifted his face to gaze at his wife, who stood resplendent as ever, unfazed by the affair. "It is still morning. We can have the deed good and done by mid-afternoon, don't you think?"

"I think we can, my love."

"And after, you may have his hands, if you wish."

"A delightful gift, my King."

Ganondorf turned his eyes back down to Link. "We may not have time to announce it. But people will come regardless. They flock to the smell of blood like so many vultures." He snorted in derision. "They, and any of your rebel friends that might be watching, will know what happens to those who betray me." Link tried to lift himself from the floor, to take whatever opportunity he had to strike, but the King's foot met his face, and he fell back, bleeding anew. "The real question is, which do we do first? Should I make you watch her head fall from her body before you are too distracted with pain to notice? Or do I make both of you watch your dismemberment before she dies?" He stood, straightening his robe. "A difficult decision. Do not cry out as if you have something to say, boy." He slammed his foot into Link's side when he released an unintelligible stutter. "This is for the best, I suppose. You will be relieved of that ugly, mangled thing you have now. And you will never again have the opportunity to do something as stupid as raise your hands against me."

When the King and Barudi stepped over him, followed closely by the still-growling fox, Link could not reach out to them, he couldn't lift himself from the ground. He just watched them leave: Barudi, flashing him a graceful smile, the wide eyes of the little fox, and the mad snarl of the King as he gripped the door.

"I will see you this afternoon," he said, and slammed it behind him.


	58. The Execution

"Public execution has always been a contested practice among the more intellectual members of high society. It is simultaneously seen as both excessive and necessary, intriguing and distasteful, evil and good; but public opinion on the matter does little to stem or encourage its practice. The people might not know the innocence or guilt of the accused (for only the gods may know that), but they trust the Crown to uphold the law faithfully and fairly, as the Crown trusts its people to obey it."

Samuel Red, "Laws of the Land"

* * *

Link had to admit the King had a point; it was probably better he lose his hand. It was barely a hand anymore—he could not tell where his fingers began or ended, where his mutilated excuses for knuckles were supposed to sit naturally, what went where under that hideously discolored and swollen skin. He could barely even make out the framework of a hand at all; it all seemed a meaningless tangle of flesh and bone, a mistake of nature, a knobby, smelly appendage of some hideous monster. In more than one place the bones protruded from skin, blood drying around the holes they punctured on their way out. The thick ropes that held his wrists together were altogether an ineffective tourniquet, neither absorbing the blood that dripped down into them nor stemming its flow (the guard who had applied the rope said that if they privileged him with shackles, the metal may protect his wrists from the downswing of the sword—and the King was not so inhumane as to let his executioner take two or more swings to dismember him). There had been less bleeding than he had expected, at least on the outside, but the way his hand darkened to a disturbing purple and swelled to a ludicrous size told him there was blood enough under the skin. The pain came and went in waves, and half the time he only felt a tingling, wooly numbness.

He did not know from what wellspring the King drew that sort of strength—if it came from him alone or the golden power that resided inside him—but if he had managed to snap the neck of his Gerudo assassin with a single squeeze of his large hand, it shouldn't surprise Link that he could do the same with a stableboy's measly fingers. He supposed he should be thankful for what he still had: one good hand, a chance to see Impa again (even atop the chopping block), and access, if only briefly, to the outside world.

Every citizen of the Capital was used to the routine of public executions. Criminals were usually hanged, beheaded, or mutilated (if the judge felt merciful that day) in groups, either because they were accomplices, prisoners together in the dungeons, or it was convenient for the royal executioner. Horse-drawn wagons, heavily barred and draped with black silk, carried one offender after the other to the district's public platform. There, the day's condemned would be taken from their cages and revealed to the crowd, to many cheers and jeers. Their crimes would be read, their sentences carried out, and if the executioner was feeling generous, he would throw a limb or head to the crowd to horrify and delight them. Then all would go home, and the public square would be as it had always been.

At least, Link could guess. He'd only been to one, and he'd been deaf then. But he had a vivid memory of the event that he couldn't shake, especially not at this moment. He didn't know to which platform in the city his caged wagon now carried him—probably the closest one to the palace, in which case it would be in the western part of the noble districts.

A particularly large bump in the road shook his aching body, drawing a new spurt of blood from his wounds and a pained cry from his lips. He twisted his wrists and the rope tightened around them, stemming a little of the blood, but it still dripped onto his pant leg freely. The little fox's bite on his leg throbbed a bit at the impact, but it was not bad—it had stopped bleeding a while ago and the pain was nothing compared to his hand.

He could hear the tittering and jeers of the people around him. The King probably didn't have enough time to make an official announcement, but when the citizens of the city saw the executioner's wagons, draped in black and shrouded in thrilling mystery, they piled into the streets after it, welcoming the unexpected distraction from the day's mundanity. He heard the delighted shrieks of children, the chatter of their parents, more than a few excited jests thrown from the crowd. He only hoped that, for better or worse, Talon was not among them.

The uproar followed him to the public square. It was a short trip—perhaps for the best, since he did not have too much time to despair, to berate himself for his stupidity, for his inexcusable audacity to throw himself at Barudi like that. He didn't have too much time to tell himself he should've known better, to ask himself what he had been thinking when he'd assumed the King did not have Impa as a prisoner. He had so little time to spare he had to force himself to think to the future—short and painful as it may well prove to be.

When the wagon rolled to a halt, the jeers and shouts of the enraptured crowd grew ever more restless. He felt the vehicle sway when the driver stepped from his seat, and after a few seconds of stillness, the veil was lifted from his cage. As the driver jiggled the key in the lock and swung the door open, Link looked over the throng. Hundreds of faces, all unfamiliar—the sheer size of the crowd astounded him. When he stepped out, hands still bound, he saw their eyes widen, their smiles broaden, their cheers reemerge from their throats with renewed vigor.

He realized it must've been his finery. Crowds like an execution best when it was the rich or powerful under the axe. The poor were merely delighted today's victim was not another criminal that looked like them, that had come from their stock and thus reinforced their unfavorable reputation; the rich were delighted with the scandal and the prospect of having something extraordinary to talk about at their banquets. Link could only imagine how animatedly Shaddon might speak of this occasion with his friends over brandy, if he were here to witness it (though, Link still couldn't be sure he wasn't).

The driver marched him to the marble platform and handed him off to two men of the royal guard. He then retreated to the pair of wagons at the bottom of the steps, expressionless. Link kept his eyes on the second vehicle, half-hoping Impa was not inside, but when the driver threw off the covering, there was no mistake.

There she was, silent and still, sprawled across the bottom of the wagon. When the driver banged his keys against the bars, commanding her to stand, she just lolled her head, eyes closed. Her matted hair had grown almost down to her jawline, and her clothes, still the same garments she'd worn on their way out of the city, were ripped and bloodstained, barely clinging to her bones. Through their large tears and holes, Link could see her pallid flesh, marked with the familiar colors of bruises. Her cheeks cast shadows over the rest of her gaunt face, her closed eyes were sunken and dark—even her tattoo seemed discolored, muted. She lay unmoving—Link squinted but couldn't be sure he even saw her breathe. The driver, frustrated with her inadvertent disobedience, reached into the wagon and gripped her ankles, dragging her out of the cage and dropping her on the stone. A pair of guards picked her up by her underarms, slung her between them and dragged her up the stairs. Her head hung limply, her feet bumped on the edge of each step as they ascended.

Link hadn't intended to jump toward her, to call out her name, but his body tried anyway. One of the guards behind him grabbed his shoulder, holding him in place, while the next pair took their spot beside him. He leaned over as far as he could, looking her up and down. She just hung between the guards, head rolling from side to side as if she desperately wanted to wake up, but couldn't. Between her bloody, bruised lips came incoherent mutterings, and wrinkles in her forehead appeared and disappeared as her face contorted in discomfort.

Link supposed if she had to die, this was the best state to do it in. But if she had to live—and she _would_ , if he could help it—this was by far the worst. She could not even stand on her own, much less follow him if he chose to elbow the guards behind him and make a likely ill-fated break for it. It seemed impossible to him she would be in this state—if the King had kept his promise and hadn't done anything to her they'd not done to him, especially in the past fortnight or so, when he'd been able to avoid all maltreatment, she should not be like this. She _couldn't_ be. She was too strong, far stronger than he was. But then, of course, there was the likely event that the King did not keep his promise. She may have just been dragged from the rack, for all he knew.

"Impa," he whispered, hoping she might lift her head and give him a wink. She just dangled limp in her captor's arms, helpless, and Link got a smack to the back of his head. He silenced himself, heart descending like a rock in water to his bowels. He reached up his good hand, taking the bad one with it, to his eyes, drying whatever useless moisture gathered there. He raised his head to look again over the crowd, hoping to avoid any familiar faces. His eyes led him past the jittering throng, up to an ornate marble balcony, over which the large banners of the King blew in the mild breeze, black and shining gold. Below them, seated with a comfortable view of the whole affair, Link saw the distant figure of the King. Beside him sat a smear of red and gold; Barudi, no doubt. He avoided her, and moved to the King's left, where a white figure hovered with an air of contentment—Link assumed it must've been Haema. He could only imagine the smug smile on the general's face at the prospect of watching his least favorite stableboy's public mutilation.

An oily-smelling, sleek magistrate, perhaps a priest, perhaps not, stepped onto the platform with a large scroll. Beside him lumbered the executioner, a black-veiled Gerudo of indeterminable gender,, big hands gripping a glistening sword nearly the size of a polearm. They made their way across the platform and stopped before the block, where the magistrate unrolled the paper before him and began to read.

Link did not listen. As the magistrate's high voice babbled on, spewing something about high treason, something about the King's mercy, something about making an example, he looked to the nearby palace. Above him, he could see the three black towers bend toward the sky, their windows and walls glinting in the cloudy light. He could see the golden gates, the battlements that rose behind the outer wall. What caught his eye was not the impressive fortifications of the building, not the splendid intricacy of the architecture, but a small, well-built structure of wood and stone sitting against the outer wall. Only the very tip of the pigeon loft protruded above the stones, but he could see it well enough. Beside that, he knew, was the stables.

He counted himself lucky to be able to see part of the stables from where he stood. He counted himself luckier that the slight spring wind, smelling of factory smoke and dust, blew toward the palace from the square. In the middle of the magistrate's reading of his crimes, he lifted his left hand to his mouth, pinched his fingers between his lips, and let loose the loudest whistle he could muster. For a moment, as the sound came screeching from his mouth, all things around him stilled. The magistrate turned, eyes wide at the bizarre act of insolence. The sound echoed, sharp and unexpected, past the crowd and through the streets, rebounding up alleys and dissipating into the sky. The Gerudo headsman twitched a little at the sudden sound, and even Impa opened her eyes for a second before rolling them back and falling, half-conscious once again, into the arms of her captors. A disquieted murmur rolled through the crowd, and the mood shifted from excitement to confusion.

Link took a quick gasp and released another whistle, pushing out the very last of his breath before the guards behind him smacked him across the head, yanked his hands away from his mouth and held them down. Link silenced himself, sweat dripping from his forehead, as the motions sent waves of agony all the way up to his shoulder. The magistrate, seeing his interruptor would not interrupt again, continued reading.

Link raised his eyes to the sky, unsure who to ask for guidance. So he listed the names of the gods and goddesses in his head—as the magistrate finished his declaration and Link was prodded forward, toward the block, he prayed to every deity he knew. When they kicked his knees and he fell to the wood, guards strapping his elbows to the block so his hands hung off the front, he prayed to the wolf-god of Mount Eldin, to the formless spirits of the forests, to Hylia and her three beautiful daughters. As the Gerudo adjusted the massive scimitar and swung it through the air above Link's wrists a couple times, ensuring the blade would pass cleanly through them, he prayed to the lowly fox-nymphs of the desert, to Molgera, who made and unmade herself as the world did.

He did not know who would answer him, if any. He just increased the fervency of his prayers as he closed his eyes, shutting out the faces of the crowd before him, the distant image of the seated King, and the glint of the executioner's sword as it moved in the cloudy light.

* * *

It wasn't as if Talon was ungrateful. He just didn't know what to do with himself, now that he was a denizen of the echelons of the useless rich. He'd been able to buy himself a house, new clothes, better alcohol and plenty of it—he and Viscen both—but he had nothing to do _but_ spend. Now that he had enough money to entice a woman to be his wife, he figured he could reintroduce himself to the hobby of courtship. Maybe a little ways down this winding road he'd find himself with another daughter—hell, if he married a Gerudo woman, even a redheaded one like Malon. Then he'd have something to do with his time. But he figured for a man going on sixty like himself, he'd have to bring a lot more to the table than a paltry fortune like his. He'd have to be the baron or duke of something-or-another. He wondered if he could buy the position with what he had left.

He'd hired a couple servants, because it seemed proper; he'd dressed himself well, because it seemed proper; he'd settled into a mansion at the end of a shining cobblestone street, because it seemed proper.

But showing up at the stables unannounced to help with the hands' work, he knew, was decidedly improper. He knew he should be out doing whatever it was the rich did (if he could just figure it out, he would throw his whole heart and soul into that particular labor), but his sheer idle boredom drew him back to the stables, not for the first time since he'd received his reward.

Gorman was never unhappy to see him. Though he looked on Talon with an uninterpretable expression whenever he showed up—maybe jealousy, maybe dismay—he always welcomed the old stablehand and allowed him to work as much as it suited him. Today was no different, though the equerry was uncharacteristically silent. It may have been a hard night for the hands for any number of reasons—a foaling gone wrong, an animal's death or injury, or merely the resurgence of post-war agitation in the workers who had marched, and fought, in the western desert.

Whatever it was, Gorman handed Epona's halter to him all the same. He led her out of the stall and through the wide doors, out into the muddy corral. One of the stablehands told him she'd been acting out lately—but they figured it was one of those mysterious ailments that follows any soldier (or, apparently warhorse) home from battle; either the unshakable trauma of what had been seen and done, or sheer civilian boredom.

Talon knew better. He could recognize Epona's particular inquietude, the way she glanced about the stables as if looking for something. He could tell she worried for Link the same way he did, but he could not reassure her in human words that he was all right. He could not tell her through a pat or a stroke what General Haema's messenger had told him: Link was perfectly fine.

It had been an incomprehensible series of events—or so that's what Viscen had told him. After months of believing the boy had drowned in the palace moat, he had shown up at the King's encampment in the desert briefly before disappearing again. Talon never would've accepted such a story had he not seen Link in the flesh—though he couldn't be sure it had been Link at all, with that cold gaze and affected manner of speech. When news came to him that the stableboy had been apprehended and Talon was to be given a reward for his hard work, all he could do was stand paralyzed in silent shock. He didn't even muster the common sense to _ask_ to see the boy until well after he was settled into his opulent, bewildering new home. And even then, no one had given him a straight answer. Link was fine. Fine. That was all they said.

"Don't worry, girl, he's all right," he told Epona. She did not seem to understand or care. "We'll see him again. Someday."

When her ears twitched restlessly and she lifted her eyes, he thought for an optimistic moment that he'd gotten through to her. But she threw her head, jerking her lead from his hand, and backed away from him, snorting. Somewhere behind him, the hounds started baying, scratching at their kennel walls. The shouts of stablehands echoed throughout the corral, and Talon dove again for Epona's lead. His hands grasped only air—she was well on her way to the gate, head rearing, a deep, bone-chilling scream echoing from her.

Talon had never seen anything like it. When a nearby stableman grasped for her halter, she knocked him away, galloping around his reaching arms and throwing her head back in fury. She kicked up dust as she hurdled the corral gate, landing well out of reach of the pursuing stablehands. She started to sprint across the grounds to a small gate in the outer wall. Talon scrambled after her, heaving himself laboriously over the fence, pausing only to wheeze and wonder when he'd allowed himself to get so fat. He plodded after her, well aware of the futility of the chase, as she leapt across the castle grounds, an uncatchable streak of fire on green, toward the little gate and the two increasingly panicked guards standing watch beside it. When they brandished their spears (probably for lack of a better reaction to a giant warhorse barreling toward them), Talon waved his arms, flailing after her. Though he could not reach the guards before she did, his voice might—

"Don't hurt her, for all the gods' sakes!" he cried.

Whether or not they heard him, they didn't seem to dare thrust their spears at the approaching animal. They just ducked and rolled, a mess of shining helmet and black cape, as the magnificent horse leapt over them. With a snort of effort and a whip of her cloud-white tail, she burst out the gate and disappeared into the city.

Talon just fell to his knees, and with a wheeze of effort, seated himself on the grass. Defeated, he wiped some sweat off his forehead and blinked. He did not look forward to having to return to the stables with more than a little explaining to do, or organize a party to reclaim Epona and undo whatever damage her rampage would cause in the streets of the Capital. Still, despite the frustration (and the bewilderment at her uncommonly bad behavior), he could not stifle the spark of admiration that burst in his chest.

"What a horse," he muttered.

* * *

A sharp crack rent the air. It jolted through Link, sending pain into his wrists, and he knew he had lost his hands. He listened for the immediate thump of his limbs hitting the wood, waited for the release of the pressure that had built up in his throbbing injury.

But none came. He opened his eyes and saw not the two bloodied stumps he expected, but his hands, just as they had been moments ago. The only difference was that they were now half-concealed in a thin, gray cloud, as if the overcast skies had fallen onto the platform. The crowd had gone hazy, though he could still hear their gasps, and even the headsman had stilled, blade hovering motionless in the air. Link blinked, and a familiar smell hit his nostrils—sharp and bitter, he realized the grayish haze around him was not the clouds at all, but smoke. Someone had detonated a Sheikah device in the vicinity, a device he'd seen used only once, and only in practice.

He gasped as Impa's lithe body, too bony, flew from the smoke. The half-dead Sheikah had burst to life and ripped herself from her surprised captors, and now jumped toward the executioner, both legs curling under her as she turned her body in the air. Two bare feet hit the veiled Gerudo in the face, and the massive body tumbled with astounding velocity to the edge of the platform, disappearing into the smoke. By the cries that rose from beyond the haze, Link figured the headsman landed somewhere in the crowd. The sword clanged to the ground, and Impa rolled to it, jumping to her feet once more with the sword in hand.

In the wave of confusion, she had just enough time to approach Link with the blade. Still struggling with her wrists tied, she swung it slowly, precisely, toward Link's shaking hands. With a soft thump and a snap of rope, it planted itself in the chopping block between his wrists, and his hands (or one hand and one monstrous appendage) were free. In the silent, almost hallucinatory moment, she met his eyes. Her gaze was sunken, watery, deprived of physical strength, but that familiar determination, the echo of her warrior's countenance, glinted in her red irises.

 _Brave, clever, beautiful Impa,_ Link sang joyously in his head _. How the hell did you manage to sneak a smoke bomb to your own execution?_

He pulled himself to his feet as Impa blocked an incoming swipe from a guard. Her sword shook, blade and arm trembling with effort, and she stumbled back. Link couldn't see beyond a few reaches of his own arm, but he could hear the clink of armor, the shouts of guards as they blindly jostled to recapture their prisoners, the confused but excited babbling and shouting of the crowd beyond the veil of smoke. When the butt of a spear emerged from the haze and barreled toward Link's face, he ducked and threw himself at its wielder, knocking him in the stomach. The man stumbled and fell, but his partner rushed up to greet Link sword-tip first. He was able to dodge the first few blows, but he knew he couldn't keep it up for forever—there was little doubt more guards would be coming their way, and soon. He knew they only had so much time before the smoke dissipated.

Somewhere to his left, Link could hear the high-pitched squeal of the terrified magistrate, and angry grunts as the executioner lumbered back into the fray. The monster was nothing but a hulking suggestion of a shadow in the smoke, but it stumbled toward Link with terrifying speed.

A tall, thin figure appeared between them, sword in hand. Link watched the two silhouettes dance. Impa's shadow put up a good fight, but her strikes were slow, clumsy, weighed down with fatigue. She parried too slowly, and as Link stumbled toward them and their shapes became clear in the smoke, the executioner ripped the sword from her weak, restricted grip.

The Gerudo swung it toward her, quicker than any such oaf should be, and blade met flesh. In a spray of red Impa stumbled backward, barely avoiding the outstretched arms of the guard behind her. She tumbled to the ground, rolling, desperately trying to keep her momentum, bare feet slapping on the wood beneath her.

Link cried out her name, tried to make his way to her, reaching out his one good hand. He did not get far before a foot emerged from the haze and kicked the back of his knee, and he fell forward, entire right arm throbbing. When he lifted his head, he saw the shadows of guards surround Impa, with no weapon left but her still-tied fists.

Someone grabbed Link's arms from behind. He let out a pained cry as metal fingers wrapped around his tortured wrist, yanking it behind his back. Pain jolted to his shoulder, and he struggled uselessly as he was dragged back into the waiting arms of the guards. He felt something rough and long slide along his forearms—he couldn't let them tie him again, not after Impa had freed him—

Something rang loud and strong above him, like the bells in Hylia's nearby church. The ropes fell away, and the familiar, earthy smell of his oldest friend flew past him like the wind. With a wild flash of white and red, Epona's hooves rang against armor once more, and the guard's helmet flew off his head, rolling with a satisfying clink to the wooden platform. His body followed soon afterward, and Link sprang up, wriggling out of his loose ropes.

Epona flew like fire through the rapidly clearing smoke, white hooves flashing, muscles rippling. Impa and her opponents seemed equally confounded by the horse's appearance, but where the executioner and guards turned their weapons reluctantly to the violent animal, Impa knew better. She ducked her head and sprinted toward her, sliding under the horse's raised legs, past the terrifying flurry of hooves. She rolled to Epona's opposite flank, and seeing Link rushing toward her, motioning wildly, gripped the horse's white mane. With an angry, desperate cry, she scrambled onto the horse's back. For a moment, when Epona reared, Link feared she would fall, but her hands held firm, her legs squeezed tight, and she stayed put.

Link sprinted to the horse, ducking once to avoid the oncoming swipe of a spear, and threw himself from the ground, reaching out with his good hand to Impa. Epona turned wildly, kicking her hind legs, but thrust herself toward Link to meet him. In the shocked, silent moment when Epona ran past him, lowering herself just slightly, he grasped the strong rope holding Impa's hands together. The Sheikah grunted and dragged him up behind her, onto the lurching back of the animal, and with one last triumphant kick, Epona launched herself from the platform.

It wasn't hard for Link to imagine what the crowd saw: a giant warhorse, as red and violent as a fire, springing from the opaque smoke like a messenger of hell itself. The throng shrieked and made way for the terrifying horse, bodies stumbling over one another in panic. A tumult of sound followed them as Link urged Epona into a gallop, leaning down and telling her without words, _faster_. With his good hand he held her mane desperately, the other arm wrapped tightly, painfully, around Impa's waist. As Epona lurched and sprang through the crowd, as he squeezed her sides with all the might left in his legs, he hoped to all the gods neither of them would fly off.

People parted before the wild horse and her malfeasant riders, screaming and swaying like water. Epona galloped through them, unhindered, as Link steered her toward the city's main boulevard, toward the city gates and the fields beyond. He knew a message to close the portcullis wasn't far behind them, and didn't know if they could beat it to the gate, but he knew their only chance was to try. The guards may send a runner, they could very well send an arrow, as Elpi had done for them during the siege of Obra Garud—but Epona would have to be faster than that. Link kicked her forward, hanging desperately by one hand, as she cleared the crowd and sprang out to the boulevard, passing by the balcony where the King watched.

Link lifted his eyes to the monarch as he flew by, though he could not say why. The roar of the crowd died in his ears, time and space stilled for just long enough that he could meet the King's narrowed gaze, so he could take in his cynical, toothy smile. He did not have time to analyze that grin, to figure out whether he was merely amused at the spectacle or if it was a grin of victory, if he knew something Link didn't, if he had set some trap for him just for this occasion. He only urged Epona onward, toward freedom, and let the moment pass.

Impa bobbed in his arm, still hanging tightly to the horse's mane. Over her shoulder he could spy the blood from her wound dripping down her arms to Epona's withers, but she held strong, keeping herself secure atop the horse's back as they barreled through market streets, past taverns and restaurants, down avenues choked with citizens (who, of course, promptly threw themselves out of their way).

Link's heart soared in his throat when Epona slid across the cobblestone and around the last corner before the gate. Beyond the thoroughfare crowded with travelers and their mounts, he spied the glint of the portcullis and the eternal sky, that Lanayru sky that he had let slip through his fingers once before. As he urged Epona toward the gate, leaning forward, he thought of nothing but that infinite blue, hidden now beyond the spring clouds. He would reach that blue, he would burst past the gate into freedom—

The screech of metal on metal rang through the streets. The citizenry, faced with a fire-red charger on one hand and a screaming portcullis on the other, retreated to the periphery of the boulevard, clutching their children and belongings, dragging their animals out of the way. A latticed shadow descended over the gates as the metal portcullis began to close, and in a wave of cloth and faces, the crowd parted for Epona. Link urged her onward, cursing under his breath, watching the metal spikes flash as the gate fell, fell toward the crowded road and his only route of escape. He screamed for space, cursing all the human and animal obstacles that stood between Epona and the vast expanse of the Lanayru fields. He banished from his mind the image of the gate closing before him, the sharp metal ripping through Epona's hide as it fell on them. He could not fail again, he _could not_.

A few sentries, spears in hand, pushed through the crowd toward the charging horse, screaming for them to halt. Epona just flew past them—one of them managed to scratch her hide with his spear blade, but she paid no mind, focused completely on the gate, intentions perfectly aligned with her rider's. She continued weaving through the crowds, hurdling obstacles, snorting toward freedom, kicking and screaming like an angry god.

The portcullis only descended faster. If there had not been so many people, so many wagons for Epona to maneuver, it would've been an easy shot to the fields of Lanayru. But as it was, Link felt he rode through a nightmare, air thick like sap, his horse's feet sluggish and desperate. When he saw the tips of the metal poles nearly at eye-level and still too many paces to go, he almost pulled Epona to a stop, almost reared her around and resorted to finding another route.

But she pressed on, and Link added his will to hers, pleading, hoping, trusting that she would make it in time. Her hooves sounded fury against the cobblestones and she lowered her head, black eyes trained far on the distance. Link threw his head down, shoving Impa's with it, as the spikes of the metal creaked over them. He grit his teeth, flinching as he felt something sharp nick the crown of his head, but when he opened his eyes, he realized he was right to trust the greatest warhorse in the nation. With a scream from all three of them, they burst from the city in a fiery streak of red flank and silk cape, of dust and blood and triumph.

Link did not slow Epona or even glance behind him as the metal gate of the city, thick and formidable, thudded shut behind him.


	59. The Ride

"There is no better place to view the stars of Hyrule than in the fields of Lanayru—the sky is unimpeded by mountains or monuments, trees or towers, windmills or walls or other signs of great civil advancement. Some may say that makes the province something of a cultural wasteland, I say it makes it a trove of beauty."

Professor Shikashi, Royal Astronomer

* * *

The King was not a man easily roused to fury—at least not as Haema was, screaming rubicund and ireful at the slightest provocation, but gods help him if that damned stableboy didn't try every aspect of his quickly depleting patience.

It's not as if the kid hadn't made a magnificent show of it—the country's divine monarch sat on the edge of his seat with the same anticipation as the rabble below him. And Epona (damn that beautiful creature) had answered the boy's prayer like a god might, descending from nowhere to deliver him in his hour of tribulation. The King could not help but smile at the sheer absurdity of the entire spectacle, the idiocy of this catastrophe.

This whole affair with the boy was turning out far worse than he ever could've expected—but he was certain that was only because he'd dared to think it could end any other way. He had hoped it would end bloodlessly, he had hoped, as he always did, to take the easy route. _That's the rub, is it not?_ he smiled to himself. _Gods do love to punish men who express too much hope—it wanders too close to certainty for their taste._ He considered the terrified yet cautiously triumphant look of the stableboy as he rode past, one arm around his Sheikah companion. _Yet he has the most hope of all. He will fall farther and faster than the rest of us. I will not make a liar of me by telling myself I will not enjoy watching it._ He apologized inwardly to his grandmother; poor, lovely Garona, so determined to make sure he did not turn out like her father. He could not say he didn't try—gods, he tried harder than even she would think reasonable. But his circumstances seemed to have other plans in mind for him. He was through with mercy—time and time again it was proving to be superfluous at best, disastrous at worst.

The King stood. Far below him, the crowd dispersed, jittering with excitement at the bizarre and improbable turn of events. The smoke had cleared from the execution platform, and the royal guard clinked from one end of the square to the other. Beside him, Haema was still screaming at whatever officer, guard or lowly pageboy who had the misfortune of finding themselves within shouting distance. He waved his arms, commanding them to muster the troops and engage in pursuit. It had been a long time since the general had had a day so thoroughly—and rapidly—ruined. He, more than the rest, looked forward to seeing the insubordinate little bastard's hands come off in a glorious spray of blood. The King supposed if he had given in to Haema's requests and let the general dismember the kid himself, they might not be in this situation. Then again, he had no reason to trust Haema would stop at his hands. He did have an eager sword and was prone to butchery—the few criminals he'd permitted Haema to execute often ended up nothing more than thinly diced piles of flesh.

He grabbed the captain of the royal guard while Haema busied himself yelling at two unlucky spearmen. "Sir Viscen," he said. "Tell me what's happening down there."

"Most of my men are at the gate by now," Viscen answered, head bowed. "But I sent a few dozen to find out who threw the smoke bomb." At the King's questioning look, he continued. "I've seen the kind before, in Eldin, sire. It's a Sheikah trick—no doubt there was one in the crowd."

"Unsurprising," the King answered. "Bring them to me alive, if possible."

Viscen bowed his head and disappeared down the balcony's stairs, red cape rippling.

"My King." Barudi's voice rang like clarity itself through his head. It was a guiding bell in the chaos of shouting around him. "Will you make to pursue him?"

"The stableboy? I'm sure Haema has already sent out plenty of men after him."

"It will make no difference either way." He eyed her, her lovely features, curved nose, her wise smile, and knew even if her words made little sense, he had an obligation to listen to them. "The boy is marked as your property, whether he likes it or not. His essence of being is service. And he has served you well in the past, before he chose his destructive path. He will continue to do so now."

"Have you seen it?" he asked her. He did not know with which gods and spirits she communed when she stared into her fires, into her obsidian mirrors of lightless glass, but he had come to accept that he may never know. Rova witches were not known to divulge their secrets, especially to men, Kings or no.

"I have been thinking—mostly about the taste of his blood."

The King furrowed his brow at her. "You're speaking of when your fox bit him?"

"I see what my familiar sees, I taste what he tastes," she answered. "And I tasted something sweet."

As the balcony cleared, Haema and the other military-types scrambling in fury, the King led his wife down the elaborate set of stairs to where their carriage waited. "Something sweet?" he asked.

"It was a peculiar water," she said. He offered her his arm and she took it, golden dress trailing on the stairs behind her. "You have heard of the eternal river of the world, have you not?"

Of course he had. He had met more than one Zora in his life, and they hardly spoke of anything else. "Yes," he said. "is that what you tasted?"

Barudi just smiled. "Its water is the lifeblood of the world, if the Zora are to be believed. It begins in the depths of the ocean's very center, flows along the deepest crevices of Hyrule and back to its beginning, endlessly."

"I remember my grandmother telling me more than one Zora priest opposed the construction of Riverton. They feared a city in the vein of the River Hylia would block the flow of this water."

"An unfounded worry. The eternal waters do not flow so close to the surface that mere boats and buildings can interfere with their course. But it is a familiar story, is it not, this admission and acceptance of circularity? Just as Molgera is born from her own mouth, as the world grows and dies and history repeats itself, so flows this unseen river."

They reached the bottom of the stairs, where two guards and a decorated brougham waited. He helped her up into the wagon and followed her, closing the door behind him. "Yes, Barudi. It is a familiar story." He couldn't ever bring himself to resent the way she spoke to him almost as if speaking to a child. She, after all, had seen two of Molgera's molts already, which meant she'd been born at least half a century before his great-grandfather. If anyone had any right to speak to him like he was still an ignorant young man, it was her, and only her.

"We are witnessing the turn of the Worm," she muttered, raising her eyes to the carriage's tinted glass. A beautiful, terrible smile passed over her colored lips. "He will return to you, my King, as the waters of the endless river return to the source." She seated herself beside him and reclined next to him. When she pressed her body against his, running a hand across his chest, his anger at the day's events left him, replaced by a wholly different sort of agitation. "But promise me, my love, that when he does, you will let me take his heart."

His eyes met hers for a moment, gold against gold, and he could not stop himself from leaning down and opening his mouth over hers. From her lips came a strange sweetness, a heart-pounding, almost bloody taste, and he knew it was the same savor her fox had shown her. It was warm and sensual, a dark, thick fragrance of encouragement, of certainty of his own continuation and that of his world. He moved his tongue, eager to get a better taste of the eternal water, even if it was only a product of her superlative witchcraft. As he pulled her closer to him, lifting one hand to her back and running his fingers along the length of her spine, he knew that neither she nor the sweetness of her taste would allow him to deny her. He could never deny her.

"I promise," he whispered.

* * *

Link did not know which gods to thank. He had prayed to all of them, so any one (or several) could've answered. He figured if only they could make themselves known, to leave a calling card or a stamp of their identity on each miracle they provided, the world would have a better idea of whom to worship or whom to thank. For all he knew, he owed them all. He could don perfumed white robes and color his lips, disguise himself as a woman and bow his head in eternal deference to Molgera. He could take a vow of silence and become a servant of Hylia or any one of her three daughters, he could become a slave to the fox nymphs of the desert, or offer up himself as a vessel for the spirits of Eldin in gratitude.

But he had little time to consider which ones to thank and how. As Epona kicked up dust behind him (too much—it almost looked like signal smoke, telegraphing their route to any and all pursuers), he had to focus on deciding where the hell they would go. Impa was fading fast in front of him, slumping weaker in his arms by the minute, Epona was snorting with too much effort, the spearman's slash in her flank dripping into the dust. He could go to Oldcastle and stop there, try to find the smoky gambling den where Impa's iffy acquaintances lingered and see if he could solicit some help from them. But that would mean he'd have to follow the road.

And he knew he couldn't follow the road. So a few miles away from the city, after he was sure they had cranked up the portcullis and sent hordes of soldiers out after him, he steered Epona into the tall grass on the wayside and rode due east. He knew there was nothing but farmland out there, a wilderness for a wanted man, but he had little choice. Epona, loyal as ever, obeyed his commands and loped through the grass, forging her own path.

He did not dare look behind him, he did not dare stop when he spied homesteads on the horizon, he did not dare solicit help from passing goatherds and farmers, he did not dare halt Epona's sweating, unsteady lope through the tall grass. In front of him, Impa had gone limp, but her bleeding had slowed a little—he knew he had to find a safe place to tend to her wound, but he didn't know how closely he might be followed, or how far he should go before it was safe to stop. He just pushed Epona on in a panic, watching for any sign of pursuers, as the sun set behind him. When he was sure he could afford to rest, he stopped by a brook and dismounted, dragging Impa from Epona's back.

The horse, panting and exhausted, stomped into the knee-deep water and nearly collapsed into it, throwing her nose into the stream and drinking deeply. On her flank, dirt and dried scabs flowed away with the current and a stream of fresh blood leaked from her wound, swirling in the water. Link lay Impa down on the shore as gently as he could with one arm, and examined her sunken cheeks and the cut across her chest. Part of her shirt had fallen away under the executioner's blade, and it seemed the bleeding had slowed—he sighed in relief when he saw how shallow the wound really was. With his good hand, he fiddled with the ropes still binding her, finally pulling them loose after a few minutes of struggling and swearing. He set them aside and crawled to the stream, quenching his own thirst before returning to Impa with his one good hand cupped full of fresh water.

He dripped it between her cracked brown lips until they opened, eager for more. He emptied his hand and scrambled back to the stream, filling and refilling her mouth until slowly, with too much effort, she opened her eyelids. She glanced at him with watery, dull pupils, the whites of her eyes laced with red vessels. She moved her gaze from him, to Epona, now munching at the reeds alongside the river, to the wound across her chest, shallow but long, still bleeding lightly. She lifted a hand and pulled up the cloth covering it, glancing at the damage.

"It's… not as bad… as it looks," she said weakly. He was already ripping his silk cape, folding it over his knee and trying with his good hand to tear a piece to fashion into a bandage. Impa sat up slowly, blinking, and when she saw the state of his other hand, what blood she had left drained from her face. "What did he do to you…" she started.

"Doesn't matter," Link said. In the panicked, adrenaline-fueled ride from the Capital, he had been for the most part able to ignore the throbbing pain in his hand in favor of focusing on his survival (and his debt to nearly all the gods in the entire country). Now, in the quietness and chill of the coming night, the pain resurged, sending weird pangs of both agony and tingling numbness up to his elbow each time he moved.

"I should… set it," Impa rasped. "I am… I can set it… if I remember what my father… taught me."

"Don't worry," he told her. "We need to cover this first. If you bleed out, how will you be my surgeon?"

She smiled, reaching out to grip his cape where he couldn't. Together they ripped a small piece off its edge and applied it to her wound. He peeled away the remainder of her bloodstained shirt, revealing the extent of her injury—a shallow but solid cut all the way from her shoulder to her opposite breast. He ripped off another piece of his red cape, longer this time, and folded it over her wound, wrapping it around her back and tying it beneath her right armpit. She helped him, fingers trembling weakly.

"It's long… but it's not deep," she whispered. "No danger. I'll be… all right. I'm just tired. From all that."

Link smiled at her, laying a hand over her collarbone and folding a stray piece of her makeshift bandage into place. He looked at her thin smile and sheer gratitude washed over him. He could hardly stop himself from gathering her in his good arm and squeezing. As she collapsed against his chest, his heart rose to his throat. Something wet dripped down his cheeks, but it may have just been a stray drop of stream water. "I can't believe you brought a bomb," he said, voice choked. "That was brilliant."

Impa apparently could no longer lift her head—she just rested it against his shoulder. Her eyes fluttered, struggling to stay open. "I thought… I thought that was you."

"Who, then…" He frowned. Perhaps it really had been the gods sending the cover of clouds. He supposed it didn't matter now, anyway.

He just held her there for a moment, feeling her warmth against him. He lowered his face and lay his brow on the crown of her head—her hair was filthy, matted with sweat and blood, but he didn't care. He couldn't help but revel in the feel of her, the solidness of her body—she had been just an image to him for too long, a ghost, a wish, a vague threat.

"You're… bleeding," she told him, reaching up to his neck.

He lifted his hand and felt sticky blood at the base of his skull, and followed the stream to a tiny cut on the back of his head, courtesy of the portcullis. It was nothing to worry about—he knew head wounds tended to be dramatic when it came to bleeding. He supposed what he really needed to worry about was his hand. He knew something had to be done about the mangled thing, and soon, but for now, the best he could do was wrap it up and hope for the best. So he tore at his cape once more and dressed it, flinching with every turn of the cloth.

"Impa," he said, turning to see she had slipped back into semiconsciousness. "We need to ride. Can you get back on?"

"Where…" she wheezed.

"Kakariko. You can sleep on Epona's back if you need to. I'll hold you." He lifted her head and stared into her sunken face, at her trembling lips. "You need to show me the way."

A thin smile crossed her face. "You do not need me. Remember what… Merel says. All Sheikah… can find their way home."

When she threatened to collapse back into the grass, he wiggled his good arm under her back and lifted. She leaned against his shoulder, and he held her there with his left hand as he glanced to his right. Even looking at it brought that throbbing ache back into his bones and sent pangs of agony up his arm. He pulled Impa up with him, trying to shake her out of her half-conscious state.

She just groaned in his ear, instinctively putting her arm over his shoulder, letting him carry some of her weight as her feet struggled to keep her upright. She was still tall and difficult to maneuver, but she was unconscionably thin, easier to lift than she had any right to be. Link's feet sank into the mud by the creek as he slogged to Epona. He called her to him and she obliged, snorting at his ear, seemingly unconcerned that he and Impa were blood-smelling wrecks halfway to the grave.

"Impa," Link rasped. "Wake up. You need to get on." She leaned against him, lifted her hands shakily up in half-conscious obedience, and gripped Epona's mane. "Think of the hot springs. If we want to get there, we have to ride."

She regained herself for a moment and pulled her body up onto Epona's. She struggled to swing a shaking leg over the horse's back as Link helped her, gripping her with his one good hand. When she managed to sit on her own, balancing unsteadily, clutching Epona's bare withers as if her life depended on it, he pulled himself up behind her. She had to grip his cape and help him up, one-handed as he was, and when he settled behind her, she was already gasping with the effort.

"Sorry…" she said. "I spent all the energy I had… in the city…"

"I know. Good thing you did," he said, urging Epona into a steady amble, "or we wouldn't be here."

She let out a wheeze that may have been a chuckle if her lungs had the strength. "I was surprised… to see you in… those clothes."

"Anyone would be." He tried to laugh through the weakness and pain, and told himself to keep strong. "That's a story I'll tell you when we get back to Kakariko."

"Link," Impa wheezed, eyes fluttering closed. "I'm sorry… I got caught."

"Don't be."

"I had to go back… for you… because I…"

"Don't talk, Impa. Rest."

"I need to tell you… tell… something…"

"You can do it later," he said. "When you get your strength back. For now, hold the rope while I tie you to me."

She obeyed as Link tried his best to secure her to him. He pulled the knot tight, saving his bad hand from holding her. Epona shifted to step over a log and Impa bumped against him, jolting in surprise and tightening her grip on the horse's mane. When the going was steady again, her head bobbed back against his shoulder, and his cheek pressed to hers. He wrapped his bad arm around her middle and rested the crook in his elbow on the knots holding her to him. She loosened one hand's grip on Epona's mane and touched his wrist, gently, removing it when he flinched in pain. "You have to… I'll set that… when I wake up," she said. Her breath came shallow from her mouth, she turned as if she wanted to look at him, but all he could feel were her eyelashes moving weakly against his temple. "Let me… don't let me fall."

"I won't." She slumped against him and he held her there, laying his chin on her collarbone and pulling her closer to him. Despite the still-tender scars on his lips, he brushed them against her neck. He couldn't help himself—when his skin touched hers, he let out something of a thankful sob. Here they were; weak, injured, fatigued, but alive and free. As night fell, as the clouds cleared away, he pushed onward, gathering what was left of his courage and guiding Epona through the tall grasses of Lanayru. The stars above them shone brightly, beautifully, guiding their way east like a trail of flickering white beacons. He told himself not to think about their own fatigue, about Epona's, about the certainty they were now being tracked and pursued, about the wilderness ahead and the hunger that already gnawed at his belly. He told himself to believe they could make it to safety—he had the strength of Hyrule's greatest warhorse under him, a clear path to the mountains, and an unwavering resolve to keep moving.

Impa had been strong for him for so long—it was more than time he returned the favor.

* * *

"I'm getting too damn old for this," Talporom panted, scrambling his way after Palo to the roof of the temple. Below them, the shouts and footfalls of the city guard echoed through the lamplit streets. They had been relentless, but as Talporom sank on the tiles beside Palo, he thought they'd finally outrun the bastards.

"I haven't had a chase that good in a long while," Palo said quietly. "Really gets the heart pumping."

Talporom listened to the guards' footsteps sink into the night—it appeared they had found other shadows to follow. "I think we're in the clear," he said, relaxing a little.

Palo leaned over the temple's gable and watched the guards disappear into the next district over. "What in every god's separate hell _happened_ , Talporom? That was a damn weird dream."

Palo's incredulity was a given—that kid could see the dead and _still_ not believe in ghosts—but even Talporom had trouble believing what he'd seen. It was as if the gods themselves had sent a sign, a messenger, a deliverer. A particularly blasphemous part of him was only irked he had been denied the opportunity to rescue his daughter, but he knew he should be thankful for what he got.

He and Palo had been in the city for weeks. They made their way to the little apartment of Sheim's and found it empty. There was no sign of Impa or Link, no sign of a struggle, no messages left—even when Talporom had met his best-informed contact in the city, he said he had successfully delivered the wagon and the goods she'd asked for, and hadn't seen her since then. It seemed as if she and Link had successfully completed their mission and disappeared into thin air, and even Telma's well-connectedness couldn't help find her.

The most interesting thing Talporom gathered was that sometime around the date Impa was set to leave the city (illustrated in a letter to the elder), there had been an uproar at the gate. Depending on whom he asked, it was a gang of horse thieves (seven of them—all Gerudo women) who had caused the disturbance; it was a pair of drunken Hylians, both male; it was an evil magician testing his latest devil-acquired powers by forcing a poor woman to do his bidding; it was a traveling botanist's Deku sprouts gone feral, they sprang from his pocket and chomped at the passing populace like so many rabid dogs; it had been a misunderstanding, an accident caused by a lax command of the city sentries. He could not help but suspect that despite the dissimilar stories, the whole tumult may have had something to do with his daughter. The problem was he couldn't derive any useful information from what he heard.

From the city records and Talporom's contact in the guard, there were no filed arrests made of any Sheikah in the past six months. There were no scheduled trials of insurgents, no hangings or beheadings—though Palo said if Link had been the one captured, being a palace slave, would've probably just had his throat slit and his body dumped in the compost with the leftovers. No records, no files, just disposal of an animal that had worn out its usefulness.

When word reached them of an unannounced public execution, Talporom's stomach dropped quickly and with a surprising severity. He wondered if it was just his parent's instinct, which was always hyperactive but rarely correct, or worse, a hint of that uncanny intuition that had plagued his mother to her deathbed. He and Palo had flown through the streets, knowing they would probably reach the stage well after the carnage began. They sprinted down alleys, across courtyards, resorted to using the city rooftops when the crowds proved to inconvenient to navigate.

They'd arrived the scene well above the crowd, shadows against the red roof tiles of a church overlooking the square. They'd hung from the exterior buttresses of the house of Hylia, surveying in the spectacle below first with silent horror and then with stupefied disbelief.

As Talporom had feared, despite his assurance to himself that his worry was nothing but an overactive imagination spurred on by fatherly concern, it was his daughter on the execution platform. She hung limply between two guards, and Link, dressed in fine clothes and with his hands bound, was pushed toward the chopping block.

Suddenly Palo was no longer beside him. The deadseer had leapt to the adjacent rooftop, dislodging a tile in haste on his way toward the platform. Talporom swore under his breath and followed, ignoring the ache in his knees and the shortness of his breath. When he finally caught up to the younger man, he already had the little ceramic grenade in his hand. They were still far from the platform, far enough that Talporom had no doubt Palo would miss.

"Wait, Palo—" he started, but with a cry of effort and a powerful heave of his muscular arm, the deadseer hurled the smoke bomb toward the platform. Talporom watched the little thing twist in the air, arc miraculously across the sky and over the enraptured crowd, wondering when Palo had gotten so burly. He had never doubted the man was strong, but that was an arm that could swing Bloodletter like a toothpick.

The bomb burst against the corner of the platform and exploded in a cloud of smoke. The crowd reeled in excitement, shouting and jostling as the execution platform was obscured in a grayish cloud. Palo leapt from the building, Talporom following suit, not sure exactly what they had planned but also unwilling to hang back and let his daughter get killed somewhere in the smoke. He followed Palo across gables and balconies, down onto an awning, and rolled to a stop on the ground.

He and Palo had been pushing their way through the crowd when he heard the unmistakable bellow of an enraged horse. He turned his eyes to the cloud and saw a fire-red beast spring from it, trailing smoke from its tail and screaming through the crowd. On its back jounced Link and Impa, mouths open in silent fear or exhilaration.

Talporom could not tell if it had been a dream, if it had been an unusual hallucination brought on by spending too much time around Palo's ever-smoking pipe, or if it had been perfectly mundane, just a day in the life of the citizens of the Capital. He hadn't been to the city in a long time—maybe things had gotten a little wilder in his absence.

He didn't have much time to consider the possibilities. Once the horse disappeared around the boulevard, the guards had mobilized. Talporom wasn't sure if they had seen Palo throw the smoke bomb, or if they had been singled out for looking decidedly Sheikah, but when they fled from the scene, the royal guard pursued. They slipped down alleyways and up to rooftops, flying over the crowds with nothing but air to stop them, and they lost the guard easily. But security was tight; when they went to the gate to see if Link and Impa had made it out of the city (it seemed they had), the guards and officers had arranged themselves into a moving formation so expansive there was no way a stranger could approach the portcullis without being seen. And that included Palo and Talporom; a few sentries spotted them and began the chase anew. They had fled from and run into the city guard a half dozen times that day just trying to get back to a safe place. And Talporom's knees were certainly feeling it.

He stretched out his legs and touched his toes, ignoring the slope of the temple roof. Palo hung off the belfry tower, checking if the coast was clear. Though he was eager to get out of the city, there was no way they'd be passing under the gate tonight. And even if they did, they had little chance of finding Impa and Link anytime soon. Sheikah were fast, that much was known the world over, but they could not keep up with a steed like that.

"Do you think it was a spirit from Eldin?" Talporom asked Palo.

"The horse?" Palo chuckled. "After that shit show, I'd believe it. But have you ever seen anyone ride a spirit?"

"There are tales of it happening in our tribe. Mostly when the spirits were stronger and far more substantial."

"So before the Conquest War." Palo paused. "I think that was the King's warhorse."

Talporom almost laughed. "That's less believable than it being a spirit."

"I don't know if you managed to get a glimpse of the King in the desert, but he was riding a horse that looked a lot like that. And Link was supposedly its caretaker for a long time, so…" he sighed. "Whatever it was… whatever the hell happened, the fact is there's still a wall between us and Impa, and there shouldn't be. If we want answers, we'd better catch up to her." He laughed a little as he descended the slope of the roof. "Never thought I'd see the day when I'm the one pissing myself trying to keep up with Impa."

"It's a day every parent prepares for. When you start slowing down and your children are at their fastest." Talporom pulled himself to his feet and followed Palo. "When you're too late to rescue them and they start rescuing themselves."

"I don't know how many normal parents face that particular scenario." They both dropped in silence to the street below. Talporom hid the pain when the shock of his landing pulsed up to his creaking knees. Palo was unfazed by the jump, only concerned with following his own thoughts. "It's an idiosyncrasy of our people, isn't it? Most parents try to keep their children from danger. Our people send theirs headlong into the thick of it as a matter of course."

"You think it's a trait of our blood, Palo," Talporom said. "But in a Hyrule without war we would keep our children from danger because we could afford to. Before the Eldin War, before the Schism War, before the Conquest War, before the men of Ordona came north with their fire and steel to take our homes from us, we lived much as other people did. We were less secretive then, you know; we worried about what to eat and how long the winter would be. We had pledged loyalty and friendship to the royal family, but that pledge hadn't yet forced us into the shadows. We did not have to kidnap princesses, abet rebellions, worry about our daughters being publicly executed."

"Well. I guess now we have a whole host of problems we didn't have then," Palo said. "The most pressing one now is getting out of the city."

"Indeed."

"It'll be much easier with Telma's help," Palo said. "If we can find our way through those tiny sewage tunnels again, we'll be golden. Smelling like utter shit, but it's better than risking the gate."

Telma's project, a massive undertaking, a system of tunnels under the city, once nothing but dirt and bones, and now… well, still mostly dirt and bones, but a few tiny, well-carved passages, made by the hammers and tools of Telma and her insurrectionist brethren. One, Telma had proudly showed them, ran to a small, inconsequential and easily-overlooked crevice half a mile from the city wall, well beyond where the last worker patrolled the sewers. It had been the filthiest, darkest, most time-consuming entrance Talporom had made into the city, but it had also been the safest.

"It certainly is an interesting way to get in and out of the city." Talporom scratched his forehead and started along the dark street, Palo in his wake.

"Do you think she might've gone to Oldcastle?" the deadseer asked.

"No, she's too smart for that," Talporom answered. "She's got half of Haema's elite on her trail now, she knows better than to stick to the road."

"Where would she have gone, then?"

"Home, perhaps?" Talporom looked to the sky, watching the clouds and smoke swirl sickly green far above him. "She's probably eager for a rest after all that's happened."

"As she should be."

"We should rest too, for now," Talporom said. "And hope in the meantime Link can take care of her for us."

Palo let out dissatisfied grunt. "I guess hoping is all we can do. Until we find them."

"Until we find them." Talporom sighed, quelling the sickening feeling in his stomach. He was not sure if it was just a father's propensity to worry, or something much deeper, something much closer to the prophecies of his mother or the uncanny instincts of his daughter. He could only hope not, since the way his gut twisted inside him was less than encouraging.


	60. The Snow-Capped Peaks of Eldin

"'Nothing like a close brush with death to make you feel alive,' my mercenary friends always told me. Sure, _they_ could say that. When it comes to close calls, they actually had a chance of surviving."

T.L. Malona, _Life and Travels of a Wayward Bard_

* * *

Impa would not wake up. They were at the foot of the mountains of Eldin, just when he needed her most, and she would not wake up. When Link pulled her off Epona, she fell limply at his feet, slipping out of his only functional hand onto the soft grass below. When he shook her, when he called her name and held her head up to the dying light, her eyelids fluttered, but they couldn't crack the yellowish mucus that had built up around them. When he placed his hand against her damp, greenish cheek, her skin almost burned him. Her blood pulsed in her thin neck rapidly, her breath wheezed ragged and shallow, and the biggest response he could elicit from her was a weak babbling from her cracked lips. No matter how he squeezed her and stroked back her hair from her sweating forehead, she wouldn't wake, wouldn't speak.

He knew how exhausted she'd been. She had barely escaped the dungeons of the palace, and had spent every last ounce of strength saving them both. He knew she needed to sleep—and sleep she had, with her wrists tied around his waist and her head resting against his back as they rode. She had slept for days, waking only a few minutes at a time to accept food wordlessly, eyelids fluttering, barely lucid. But he had expected that much; he remembered his own weakness after he'd been set free from the King's dungeon—he could not so much as walk up a flight of stairs without stopping to rest. He knew the kind of exhaustion that could force someone to sleep through the swaying of a horse's movement, through the cold spring rain that chilled the misty fields, through the close calls when she started to slip from Epona's back and Link had to readjust them both (painfully, with much effort and without the use of one hand). But he knew also that kind of deep sleep was regenerative—that it restored health, invigorated the blood and left one stronger upon waking. It was not the kind of rest that pulled one closer to the permanent sleep of death, so Impa should've woken up—by all rights, she should've woken up when he shook her. But here she lay, unresponsive, clammy and pale.

And she had gotten this way in his arms. He had not stopped touching her, had not broken contact with her body, since she had been awake last, weak and silent but able to pull herself onto Epona's back. Sometime between then and their arrival at the foothills of Eldin, she had degenerated into this state, when he had his hands on her, or hers on him, when she was close enough that he should've felt it. She had gotten so weak so fast, he knew he should've sensed the moment she started to decline. He too was feeble, tired, barely functioning—as were they all, horse and riders alike—but still, he should've known. There was no question that this was the result of his negligence.

He peeled away her makeshift bandage. It came off with a sickening wet sound, sticking to her skin in protest. Something clear and sticky oozed from the shallow wound, crusting around the edges of the cut and caking her swollen red skin. A putrid, unnerving smell met his nose and he turned his head away, cursing himself.

He should've had the foresight to steal some medicine at the last farmhouse he'd encountered. It had been miles and miles ago; he'd broken a few pots of goat's milk and drank the contents, stolen some vegetables and a few apples from the nearby orchard, and pilfered length of rope with which he could more easily secure Impa. The thought of medicine should've crossed his mind, but by the time he had gathered enough food, the farmer had discovered him, and crossbow in hand, chased him off his land.

The only things he could offer Impa were sour, early apples and a few turnips, but when he lowered them to her lips she did not respond. So he propped her up, her mouth hanging open slightly, and chewed it himself. He resisted (quite heroically, he thought) the compulsion to swallow and fill his own empty stomach, and pulled the strings of chewed food from his mouth to give to her. Sometimes it was still hard for him to touch the sensitive skin of his lips; he swore he could still feel the short slivers of gold thread inside him, he could still feel the pain of the needle driving through his skin. But he ignored the jolt of his stomach and pulled the food from his mouth, pressing it to hers.

Her lips twitched a little—a promising sign—but the chewed food just fell from her open mouth into her lap as she slumped forward. He tried a few more times to force a little down her throat, but when most of it ended up clumping at the corners of her mouth or dripping onto her chest, he saved the next few bites for himself.

They were far from help now. He didn't know if they were still in Lanayru, or Eldin, or the Plains Provinces, or at the fateful corner where the three met, but he did know that it would take half a day to get back to the nearest homestead. Even then, he couldn't guess how likely it was that anyone inside would have the medicine Impa might need (not to mention the closest house was the one whose owner had caught him pillaging the fields). Besides, even if he backtracked to the last marker of civilization, he would be retreating in the direction of any possible pursuers, and the last thing he needed was to run into the King or any of his men. He could head north, into the wild lands of the Plains Provinces, and hope that he would come across a friendly settlement instead of the infamous tribes of bandits that patrolled its wide expanse. Or he could start climbing.

The Eldine mountains rose ahead of him, jagged and red, wide bases thick with trees. Beyond the nearest range, peeking above the snow-tipped line of rocky outcroppings, he could make out the summit of a mountain so grand it had to be none other than Eldin. He could not tell how far it was, or how many smaller hills he'd have to cross before he could get there, but he knew that somewhere near the base of that massive god of a mountain, safely hidden in the shade of the forests, Kakariko lay waiting for them. Somewhere beyond the trees and streams and valleys of melting snow, Elder Merel sat by her fire, watching, gnarled hands folded contentedly, healing herbs piled high on the shelves carved into her walls. On the slopes of that distant mountain, a hot spring bubbled, a comforting fire burned, a sweet smell wafted from Irma's cooking pot.

The decision became clear in his head. After all, it was well known that all Sheikah could find their way home, from anywhere. Over mountains, through plains, across rivers—they all shared the same miraculous homing instinct that could guide them back into the light of their families' fires, back into the protective shadow of Mount Eldin. And though he did not share their tattoos, their looks or their proclivity for dark magic, they were the closest thing he could call his community, and Kakariko was now the only place he could even dare to think of as a home.

That alone would have to guide him.

* * *

Epona would not leave them. He had told her—in gestures, in words, in subtle movements and blinks—to go free, to run across the vast plains, to make herself a fine mount to some other rider. He told her the jagged cliffs and unstable scree were no environment for a charger like her. He told her the gnarled, protruding roots of the thick forests would catch her hooves, the loose rocks of the snowy heights would crumble under her weight, but she did not listen. She could not be shooed or discouraged.

So he had no choice but to let her follow. Link knew she would not keep up with them for long—just beyond the lazy foothills, the rock shot up into the sky with unnerving steepness, jutting above the tree line like a wolf's teeth. Figuring Impa had farther to fall from Epona's back than from his, he lifted her weight, bending at his waist to hold up her lanky, absurdly light form. He could not balance her on his back with only one hand, no matter how dextrous he thought himself, so he wrapped his pilfered rope around her legs, wound it around his waist and hers, looped it over his shoulders and around her wrists. It was a convoluted, precarious contraption, but it would save his left hand from much effort and his right from any. The mangled limb hung in a sling crudely fashioned from lengths of silk from his cape.

He was a wreck—he had proven himself the world's worst medic, but if his shoddy bandages and complicated contraption of rope could help him survive to get to Merel in time, he might be able to count himself as something other than a complete failure. If he could just get to the elder and her medicines, maybe she could heal Impa, maybe she could even heal him. Or, if his hand was too far gone to possibly be salvaged, she could remove it safely. He gulped when he considered the likely possibility. His hand did not seem so much a part of him anymore—perhaps its flesh had already begun to die. He worried the next time he peeled away the bandage to look at it, his skin would come off with it and the limb would fall apart irrevocably, completely, before his eyes. He tried not to think about it, but each time he took a step, each time he stumbled or lost his balance, his hand throbbed.

Regardless, he kept onward, holding his rope tightly and readjusting Impa when she threatened to slide off his back. It was slow, painful going, up and over the forested foothills and into the steeper mountains, but by the end of the first day, he had reached the tree line of the westernmost slope. The air settled into a freezing chill, and when he untied Impa and lay her down under the protective branches of a drooping cedar, he noticed her feet had paled to a sickly, numb yellow. He sat beside her, bending to remove his boots and socks to give to her when Epona thrust her head between the branches, snorting in discontent.

He was not surprised that she had made it this far. The slopes had not steepened enough for her to have much trouble, and the mounds of Lanayru grasses and icy streams provided her with the energy to keep her going. Link knew he had run her ragged in the past few days—if anything she deserved to lounge in the sun and rest, but she seemed determined to follow them. Link could not say he wasn't grateful. She was certainly a better conversation partner than Impa, with the latter in her sickly state.

He thought of building a fire, but quickly realized he didn't have the means. He had no flint, no matches—he could probably gather firewood with his good arm but he did not have two hands to rub enough friction into any kindling. Perhaps if they hadn't sent Impa's harp off with Zelda's family, then he might've had the gall to try to coax some fire magic from it, but as it was…

"Last meal before we start foraging again," Link muttered to Epona, and she snorted. He raised an unripe apple to his mouth and she watched with something like jealousy as he broke it between his teeth. "Not for you," he said. "Not for me, either."

After chewing sufficiently, he lifted Impa's head and again pushed the sour mush between her lips, lingering there for a while, cradling her. He tilted her head back, slowly, and ran his fingers across her throat, as he would to encourage a dog to swallow. He knew better than anyone that people could be like hounds, so maybe…

He let out a sigh of relief when she made a small noise, fluttered her eyes and swallowed. Epona watched curiously as he took another bite and repeated the process, twice, thrice, until her head drooped with exhaustion and her last tiny glimpse of consciousness fled from her. He lay her on the soft dirt under the tree and crawled down beside her, throwing his silk cape over them both. She shivered against him, so he turned his body to face hers, laying his right arm over her waist and wrapping his left around her. He pulled her against him and rested his head by hers—he wrinkled his nose at the scent of her wound leaking through her bandage, but he held her there until the chill of the spring night retreated from their bones, beyond the protective branches of their tree. Somewhere beyond the needles, Epona drifted, watching over them as the last glow of clouded sun disappeared from the night.

"Tomorrow," he told Impa, "we will reach Mount Eldin."

He knew it wasn't true—unless fortune favored him like she'd favored no other before. But there had been more than one miracle that visited them recently—their botched execution, Epona's dramatic reentrance into his life, their glorious ride through the gates of the city. He did not know if the gods granted favors in streaks, but he could hope.

* * *

The next day, as Link expected, they did not reach Eldin. They did, however, with much effort and more than a few close calls, manage to make it over the nearest peak, still laden with winter's snow. Link had marched up the scree weighed down with Impa's limp body, Epona close behind. Both he and the horse slipped more than once, sending stones tumbling down the hillside, but eventually he made it to solid rock once again. It was hardly better—steep and jagged, freezing and slippery with snow, but he kept his eyes on the shining outcroppings, on the beautiful notch between two adjacent peaks where he knew he could pass over to the next valley. Epona struggled behind him, and despite her stumbles, her hesitation and fearful snorting, she managed to keep up.

He had continued trying to dissuade her. With looks and gestures, he'd told her again and again to turn around, to make her way back to the grassy fields, where she was safe, where she could find food and water or maybe a new rider—the plains tribesmen had a reputation for their stellar horsemanship, surely one of them would treat her well. And if not, there were dozens of the King's men out looking for them, and they would no doubt take care of her.

"They'll take you back to the stables," he shouted at her from the top of a craggy moraine. She just lingered in its shadow, snorting. "They'll feed you well, Epona. They'll keep you healthy. This is no place for a horse."

But she had proven to him that perhaps, against all logic, it was. Even when he had to resort to sliding through narrow crevices, cling to crags desperately with his good hand as his feet tried to navigate to solid rock, Epona invariably followed. She fell, once or twice, and her surprised screams sent shocks of guilt through him—but he knew this was what she chose. She would not listen to him, and whether that was some fault of his training, or whether she simply could not resist the desire to follow, he knew he couldn't stop her now.

When the steep slope of the scree eased into the flat of the pass, Link wheezed to a halt, readjusting Impa on his back and taking in the view. The wind screamed past him, a few flakes of snow dazzling about his eyes, but he could see in the distance the bulk of Eldin, rising high over its craggy counterparts. Its grey body sat proud in the cloudless sky, and Link could see its slopes obscured in mist as they rose mightily from the alpine forests. Between him and the peak that gave the province its name rose a few chains of smaller mountains, each tipped in the remnants of winter. In their shadows and on their crumbling slopes lay wet, glacial valleys, rivers and lakes, glens colored with the buds of wildflowers. Link almost laughed—if he hadn't been in such dire straits, if he was not in such pain, if his stomach had not been roaring at him so vehemently, if his knees did not threaten to buckle under the weight of he and Impa both, he would've liked to stand there forever, just staring across the beautiful ranges of Eldin.

But as it was, he had to tighten his grip on Impa and start his terrifying descent. He slid down the scree, carefully crept down the gullies and snow-laced couloirs, down toward the knots of trees that blew in the fierce wind, all the while assuring Impa that he had her secure, that he would not let go of her. Of course, it was obvious to all three of them (even with one unconscious and the other a horse) that he did this only to reassure himself. He thought he probably sounded like Palo, babbling utter nonsense under his breath all the time, but whether or not his words actually guided him, he slid safely to the flattened, rocky coulee. When he stumbled to a halt among the stunted trees and black lichens, he lifted his eyes to see Epona carefully plodding after them, laying each hoof with care on the unstable ground. He shouted some words of encouragement to her before he continued his path downward.

He thought of letting Epona bear the burden of Impa. It would certainly be easier on his back, on his arms, his sore feet. But the horse might stumble on these precarious slopes, she might falter—Link's mind conjured images of Impa hitting her head on a rock, of Epona crushing her, of her tumbling from the horse's back and off the edge of a rocky precipice. At least on his back, she would not have far to fall. He could reach out to grab her if she slipped, and he would provide her with something soft to land on.

So he carried her, following the distant promise of Mount Eldin, across the valley. He carried her through the larch and spruce, through the buttercups, paintbrushes, larkspur and budding firegrass, through the wild rose and asters, toward the next chain of hills where the late clouds of spring still deposited fresh snow on the peaks.

He stopped at the rising slope of the mountain just as the sun hit the horizon. A few patches of unmelted snow shone gold around him, and the trees swayed gently. The air was surprisingly warm, the sun still radiated encouragement as it balanced on the tip of the peak to the west. Epona slowed her pace, stopping to bite at the thin grass around them, tail whipping her flank against the evening flies. Link lay Impa in a bed of budding wildflowers, removing his cape and draping it over her before reaching to stroke her hair back from her sweaty forehead. He looked at her darkened eyelids, her pale, cracked lips, the way her cheekbones cast shadows across her face in precisely the way cheekbones shouldn't, and a painful sadness overtook him.

"This place is so beautiful," he told her. "You can't die here, Impa." She wheezed shallowly and turned her head. Her eyebrows drew together under her clammy greenish forehead, and she let out a thin, weak groan. He rested a hand against her cheek and wiped some rheum away from her eye with his thumb. "I know you won't."

He wouldn't let her. He tucked the edges of his ripped cape under her sides and made his way to the greener patches of trees, looking for something to eat. He had no bow to hunt, he had no strength to chase down prey—the only sustenance he could find were a handful of early berries and a sweet flower whose petals Irma sometimes used to steep her tea. He gathered as much of these as he could and made his way back to her, repeating the process that he had come in the past few days to think of as a ritual. He chewed for her, lowering the food to her mouth, stroking her neck and encouraging her to swallow. When he was done feeding her, he gathered some snow and repeated the exercise, melting the water in his mouth and letting it fall from his lips to hers. She seemed a little more eager for water than the tasteless mush of leaves and berries, but any eagerness at all was a good sign. Sometimes he would find himself lingering over her mouth longer than necessary, feeling her warmth and comforting himself with the brush of her feeble breath on his cheek.

When he lay down beside her, curling himself against her, Epona sauntered over to their bed of grass and wildflowers, folding her long legs under her and lowering her body with a relieved snort. Link scooted a little closer to her, pulling Impa gently behind him, and settled them both against the warmth of her red body.

"Don't turn over on us in the night," he told her, and she tossed her head, offended. He lay his hand against her back and stroked it softly, taking in the familiar smell of her, feeling the comforting rise and fall of her large chest. "I'm glad you're here," he whispered, despite the guilt of seeing her struggle, the fear that she might twist a knee or snap a leg, or fall victim to any roving predators. But she did not need him to tell her that; she knew.

He relaxed in her warmth, pulling Impa closer to him, letting himself hope that soon enough they would see the smoke of Kakariko rise in the distance. He told himself they would—after all, every Sheikah could find his way home.

"Tomorrow," he whispered to Impa, "we will reach Mount Eldin."

* * *

One day and one mountain pass later, he removed her bandage. The smell of her wound nearly knocked him over, and he had to hold his breath when he leaned in close. It was brownish, greenish, bluish—every color it should not be. As he washed it in the glacial waters of a mountain stream, he could barely stand to look at it. The freezing droplets carried away clumps of dried fluid, but new flows immediately replaced it, rising to the surface of the swollen wound. He cleaned it as thoroughly as he could, gently wiping in and around the edges, ignoring her flinches of soporific pain.

He ripped her a new length of bandage, but he knew he was running out of expendable clothing. Each day they crept higher up into the cold mountains, and each day he had a little less cape left to keep them warm during the night. He was sure without the warmth of Epona, they both would've succumbed to the chilly winds and freezing rain of the Eldine spring. But unless the miraculous horse could produce real bandages from somewhere, or better yet, food and shelter, he wasn't sure if her warmth alone would help. He needed to get to Merel, he needed to get Impa's wound treated and the infection stemmed, he needed to get good food into both of them, get them into the comforting light of a fire…

As he lay the cloth across her chest, he couldn't stop the panicked sob that rose to his throat. He coughed it out—just one—and tightened the bandage. He sat back against the wet rocks, fumbling with his rope, pulling it around his legs and preparing to haul her once again onto his back. He hadn't even examined his own wound since reaching the Eldine foothills—he could only guess what a disgusting mess it looked like. Though it still sent pangs of agony up his arm every time he moved it, it did not burn, it didn't bleed, it didn't ooze fluid through its slapdash dressing. He knew he needed to take comfort in the few good things he had, and the confidence that he did not share Impa's infection was one of them.

He hauled her onto his back and looked up, above the waving pines and larches and spruce, to the next set of jagged obstacles, rising between him and the mammoth body of Mount Eldin. He adjusted her legs, ignored the savage growling in his stomach, the cold exhaustion in his feet, and moved on.

* * *

Kind of a short chapter this time around-or at least it seemed short, so I'll probably be posting another next Tuesday! Thanks for reading, as usual!


	61. Homeward

"If you know a man who does not have a healthy respect for the brutality of nature, I suggest throwing him in the middle of Eldin. He will come out a changed man, if he comes out at all."

Chief Komali of the Tribe of the White Bird (Eastern Plains Provinces)

* * *

Link awoke to the howling of wolves. He shot straight up, bumping his head against one of the lower branches of their sheltering tree, and scrambled to his knees. Somewhere beyond the branches, Epona wandered, snorting and stomping impatiently. Link leaned over to Impa, and quickly making sure she was still alive (her heartbeat was frantic, feeble, but still there), he threw her over his back and tore out from under the branches.

He knew he should've counted himself lucky they had avoided both human and carnivorous pursuers for as long as they had. But he'd also had the impertinence to hope that he might reach Kakariko without encountering any at all. Clearly the mountains and their wild animals would not allow it.

Link crept to the edge of the nearest escarpment, following the sounds. He peered down the steep precipice of crumbling rock and gripped Impa tighter, stomach dropping to his feet. He saw more than a few grey figures creeping in the valley below him, shaggy coats shining in the dawn. They sniffed around, backs arched, paws kicking up dirt and dislodging rocks. Link did not know if it was him they smelled, or Impa, or Epona. He wondered if horses shared a scent with other hoofed creatures, and the pack had mistaken her for a lone deer or elk. Ultimately it didn't matter—the wolves had awoken hungry and had now found something to stalk.

He took a moment to feel the air around him. He was upwind of them, and only had one direction to go. With a numbing wave of fear, he realized they would be able to smell him for miles to come, if the wind did not suddenly abandon its course. He tightened his grip on Impa and stepped away from the escarpment, toward Epona. She snorted at him, stomping eagerly, almost as if urging him to climb on her back and let her carry him up the scree before them.

"You're slower than I am on that kind of terrain," he said to her. With a wave of guilt, he realized it would mean that she would be an easier target for their canine pursuers. Perhaps Epona would prefer it that way. Perhaps not.

He started his scramble up the hillside, up past the timberline into the windy, desolate territory of the mountain's summit. Perhaps the wolves would turn back if he wandered too far into the barren, freezing territory of the mountaintops, or they would turn their eyes to other prey—Link had seen marmots and mountain goats aplenty in the high crevasses of the peaks. He could only hope that a stray mammal would inadvertently put itself between him and his canine pursuers, but he knew it was unlikely. He knew he was a prime target: they could probably smell his weakness, Impa's sickness, Epona's uncertainty.

As he turned to gauge the distance between him and the wolves, he could tell just by their gait, by the way they slunk along with noses to the ground, that they were ordinary animals, hungry and merciless. Besides their mere shape, they shared nothing with the mysterious black wolf Link had followed up the slopes of Eldin so long ago. They did not call out to him—only to each other, in quick whines and throaty howls. If they had been a pack of equally aggressive hounds, he could've easily calmed them. But they were wild and pitiless, and if they were half as hungry as Link himself, he would not be able to convince them to look for food somewhere else.

He dislodged rocks and uprooted scraggly shrubs while he clambered toward the gathering clouds and the mountain's flattened peak. His legs shook under him, and every breath burned, each step a gamble on whether the scree would hold or whether the three of them would tumble back down the mountainside in an avalanche of rock and torn limbs, straight into the wolves' hungry mouths. Somewhere beside him, Epona struggled, stumbling once and picking herself back up, catching up and falling behind again, hooves desperate to find purchase on the scree. When a frustrated whinny echoed up the pass, Link dared to glance down behind him—Epona staggered forward, barely recovering herself on the steep slope. She pushed from the rock with one hoof, the other lifted high, limp and scuffed. On three legs she continued up the hillside, keeping the forth weightless before her. He could see the determination in her black eyes, the frustration in the way she tossed her head as she climbed on.

Behind her the black forms of the pursuing wolves darted up the scree. They sank low to the rocks, graceful and quick despite the uneven, unstable ground below them. There must've been more than half a dozen, pawing and growling their way up the slope toward Epona. Link's heart dropped through his stomach, and he could not take his eyes off the struggling horse, stumbling and leaping up the rocks after him. He thought frantically, wheezing with effort and fear, and before he could stop himself, he lowered his weight and leaned against the mountainside. He let the ropes over his shoulders hold Impa's weight while his left hand gripped a fist-sized stone. With a grunt of painful effort, he hurled it down the mountain, at the nearest wolf.

It didn't hit the animal—it was still too far to be within throwing distance—but when it clattered down the mountainside, the wolf briefly slowed its pace, tail high, ears lowered at the sudden interruption. It glanced up to Link and for a moment their eyes met, red to blue—it was a short-lived, meaningless moment, and the wolf lowered its head to resume its pursuit, hackles raised.

Link threw another rock (he did not linger to see where it landed) before turning and launching himself up the slope. His feet and legs screamed with effort, sweat poured down his face, his stomach twisted in hungry pain. _Where do I even think I'm going?_ he asked himself miserably. The voice in his head that taunted him with such questions seemed to be beyond the limits of his own fear, his own occupation with the current situation. _If I make it to the peak, they will kill me there. If I make it to the lee, they will kill me there. If I make it to the outskirts of Kakariko, they'll probably kill me there._

Despite the arguably good points the terrible voice made in his head, he pushed on, through the cold, through the wind, through the devastating sounds of Epona's determined snorts and the scrambles of the pursuing pack. Not daring to look behind him, not daring to guess when he'd feel the sharp pain of teeth and claws ripping through him, he stumbled on, placing one foot in front of the other and disallowing himself to think of anything else but running.

When he lifted his head once more, he was at the top of the slope, at the rocky lip of the great peak, looking down over the next valley. There it was—Eldin's base, just beyond the next few rolls of forested mounds, far below him. And somewhere on those slopes—

Epona materialized beside him almost by magic, limping to his side with a panicked snort. He glanced behind him, down the rocky slope, and saw the shaggy shapes of the oncoming pack, saw their fur bristle and their eyes shine, and his desperation flared up again, rekindled by the speed at which the wolves closed in.

There was no way he would let a bunch of dogs take this from him. He was so close, _so close_ to Eldin, so close to Kakariko. He examined his surroundings for something, anything, that he could use—a boulder, a large stick, an antler left from a stag's molt—anything he could use to fend off the slavering mouths of the hungry pack. But he found nothing but endless grey sky, a lone struggling sapling and a few sharp rocks. He picked one of these from the ground beside him, adjusting his grip on its irregular shape, and prepared himself.

When the pack came rolling over the slope and into the saddle point of the pass, the harrowing sounds of their hunger came with them. Barks, growls and snaps flew in the wind to his ears, and the creatures, seven or eight of them, lowered their heads as they advanced.

Link did not know if it was the solid, flat ground of the mountain's peak or the immediate threat to him that spurred Epona to stand her ground. It did not matter. All he knew was that one moment, he was on his knees, Impa still on his back, clutching a rock in preparation for that initial bite, and the next a flash of red heat was before him, screaming in anger. He should've expected it—she was no goat or deer, no elk to be taken down so easily—she was a warhorse, and according to the King's word, which was the law of the land, the best one in the country.

When a black hoof struck the first wolf across its furrowed face, it retreated. Ears back and eyes narrowed, it shook its head, slinking behind one of its comrades. The next wolf, less than eager to receive the same treatment, lingered out of reach of her bludgeoning hooves. Epona stood strong, even with her bruised ankle, and faced them down. She looked like some great, dark fire against the grey sky, some absurd spirit from another time, brought to life at the sight of blood and the promise of battle. Perhaps she had missed this sort of altercation. She was, after all, a charger of great distinction.

She just taunted the wolves, snorting, making to charge and then backing off, as they stalked and slavered, keeping their heads down and their hackles high. Horse and wolves lingered in the saddle of the nameless peak, locked in an impasse, each trying to outface the other. It appeared as if they might stay there forever, battling on the scree, all false starts and snapping uncertainty.

With a pinch of guilt, Link knew what he had to do, knew what Epona wanted him to do. Safely unnoticed in the shadows of the adversarial standstill, he shifted his weight, apologizing profusely in his head. Still clutching the rock in his hand, he picked himself up and crept to the opposite slope. Without turning to plague his terrified mind with any certainty of Epona's fate, he threw himself down the lee side of the mountain.

His feet barely kept up under him. His own weight and Impa's threatened to overtake his stride, to throw him forward into the snowy rocks, but by the blessings of some spirit or another, he kept his footing. He slid down the scree, crying out, barely keeping himself upright. His mind was an incomprehensible maelstrom of lamentation, panic and hope—and the rest of his body was hardly better composed. He threw out his hand for balance, feet kicking rocks out from under him. He slid and scrambled and screamed to the base of the scree, letting out little sobs of effort with each faltering step he took. When the slope eased into a steady moraine, when the hardiest trees of the hill poked from the rocks, he dared to slow his pace.

He adjusted Impa on his back, dropped the rock he had carried from the peak, and glanced behind him. His eyes followed the incline up to the top of the pass, where shadows, no more than suggestions of animals from this distance, danced against the grey sky. Link could not make out exactly what went on—he could hear the echo of growls in the wind, could see the faint shifting of silhouettes, but couldn't picture the outcome of the skirmish. And he couldn't linger long enough to find out.

He knew he could not call her name. He knew he could not shout apologies up at her, though he wanted to. He just wished her luck, and prayed fervently to whichever god had answered his prayers before, to keep her safe. But he would not waste the time she had given him. Even a horse knows not to do anything in vain.

So he trod on, legs trembling, stomach growling, tears flowing freely down his face, toward the base of Eldin. With each step he choked back another cry, with each mile he put between himself and Epona, his heart sank a little more. It beat with agony against his ribs, and each breath barely kept him standing, barely kept his tired legs working. But he would be damned if he could not get Impa to Kakariko. He would be damned.

When the sun sank behind him, illuminating the peak he had fled, he knew he could go no farther. He collapsed at the base of a boulder, wheezing, whole body shaking, voiceless breath pushing out nothing but useless whimpers. He untied himself from Impa, hand trembling, and lay her down beside him. As usual, he checked to see if she was even still alive before laying his head on her stomach, wishing her heart may beat a little stronger, wishing her breath could come and go with a little more surety. With a wave of abject horror, and a bubbling of nausea, he realized she might leave him in the night. She might step from her broken body and wander the hills like all the other spirits of the province—worse yet, Palo might find her ghost, aimless and agonized, pacing the hills by her village. Instinctively he squeezed her, crying into her skin, begging her to stay with him.

He did not even have the strength to say the words aloud, but he hoped somewhere in her head, buried so deep in haze of sickness, she would hear him plead. He wished she could hear him tell her that if she died here, whatever sacrifice Epona had made would be wasted completely. That they were so close to Kakariko, that she had no excuse to give up now. That Palo and Talm would kill him, absolutely _kill him_ , if she died under his watch.

He pulled himself closer to her and threw the remains of his cape over them both. He rested his head against hers, ignoring the discomfort of the rocks under his back, the horrid, nauseating hunger inside him, the trembling of his wasted muscles, and told her in his head that tomorrow, tomorrow they would reach Eldin.

* * *

Four times since the morning Link had faltered, sure beyond absolute certainty that he could not go on, and four times he had picked himself up and persevered.

If only Epona had listened to him when he told her to go off into the plains, to find herself some wild herd or some other rider to befriend. If only she had galloped off into those endless waves of grass, a strong, safe and happy creature. If only she had not so foolishly chosen to follow him into the territory she had no right to boldly tread, the domain of mountain goats and swift deer, of bears and wolves and other hunters, if only…

And now, gods knew where she was. If she had survived, no doubt she would've found them by now. Or maybe she was wandering, lost in the Eldin range, injured and alone. _Goddesses damn me_ , Link said in his head. _Damn me to all the worst hells of this world._ He could not stop his eyes from watering, but he held his tears, telling himself to conserve his energy and moisture. He could not weep for her now, he could not. It was not a luxury he could afford.

When his foot, blistered and raw in his boot (for he had donated his socks to Impa's frozen feet days ago), slipped into the water of a quick stream, he bent down and lowered Impa on its rocky bank. He brushed her hair back from her green skin, now sunken and wet, and checked for a pulse. As usual, she was weak but holding on to what little strength she had left. She, like he, had not eaten for at least a day, and had kept down little water.

Now, it seemed she got worse by the hour rather than the day. The smell of her wound was almost unendurable—the ungodly stench of the yellowish fluid permeated the air around her, soaking into what remained of her torn clothing. As he removed her bandage, he had to hold his breath for fear that he might have to scramble away from her to retch dryly on the stones. He threw the cloth aside and tore her a new bandage from the sleeve of his jacket (he had become adept in the past few days just using his good hand and his teeth), but before he lay it over her torso, a flash of green caught his eye. He lifted his head, eyes settling on a tiny plant poking its brave stem from the rocks around it, delicate and long-leafed.

Link did not know if the memory was merely brought on by sheer, delusional desperation, or if it was legitimate. But he seemed to recall Talporom, bent over a fallen warrior at Obra Garud, cinching a tourniquet about her leg. She threw back her head, hissing in pain, as he applied a few fresh herbs to her wound before circling a bandage around it—herbs that had long leaves.

He knew it was probably not the same plant. He knew it had an equal chance of being poison as medicine, that he could very well make her infection much worse. But she was so far gone, so weak and so close to succumbing to her infection that ate away at her skin and sapped her strength.

"Either I kill her or the rot does," Link said aloud. His voice was horse, weak, but its presence assured him of his course of action. He limped over to the plant and plucked its leaves, massaging them in his hand for a while, just to make sure his skin did not redden or itch because of it, and returned to Impa. He bent by her side, and holding his breath, snuck them between her oozing flesh and the layer of cloth he stretched over it.

When he picked her up and slung her across his back, he stopped for a moment to consider the possibility that he had just killed her. But he knew if she had the choice between dying from a nameless disease or dying by his hand, she'd choose the latter.

It was cold comfort, but it was comfort nonetheless. He would kill her, and the mountain would kill him.

Far above, the first freezing drops of a spring shower rustled the swaying trees.

* * *

 _All Sheikah, no matter how far, can find their way home. All Sheikah can find their way home. All Sheikah…_

So why couldn't he—why in all the gods' hateful cursed names _couldn't he_?

He had no recourse. Here he was, Eldin's peak soaring above him like a dream he could never grasp, and he could not find his way. He had nowhere else to go, except for down. Down into the dirt, down into the veins of rivers and bones of rock that made up this terrible province, down into the same hell that Impa was no doubt falling into as he struggled, useless, cursing the gods.

The freezing rain of spring poured down on him—it appeared the gods were laughing so hard at him they had started crying. His hands slipped, his feet slipped, his too-long hair stuck against his forehead and he shivered uncontrollably despite his sweat, despite the effort of climbing, descending, and climbing again.

He wandered what he figured may have been south, toward Old Riko, but for every rocky outcropping or struggling clump of spruce he thought he might recognize, there were ten more he did not. He could not find his way between them, could not navigate around the cliffy sides of the massive mountain. He knew he had to go downslope, but no matter how long he descended, how far he wandered down the gullies and glacial valleys around Eldin's base, he did not come upon any marker he could follow.

His legs shook with each slow, futile step, his head drooped forward, heavy with exhaustion. His whole body burned with the effort of moving, of bearing the weight of himself and Impa, of simply being alive. Each breath burned his lungs like someone had dropped coals in his chest, and his stomach turned over itself with such ferocity he knew if he even tried to eat he'd only throw it back up. But he kept on, kept hoping he might see a pillar of smoke rise in the distance, that he might catch a glimpse of Old Riko's creaking windmill miles and miles down the forested slopes, that he might see anything— _anything,_ to help him make his way back home.

Because if he could not, if he failed here, he would never be worthy to even set foot in their presence again. He would not be worthy to stand before Talporom, to accept Irma's kindness, to laugh with Talm at one of Palo's inappropriate jests. He could not face the elder again, not as he was now, a weak, sniveling lost boy, mired in defeat, who had killed his only friends wandering into the hopeless wilderness. And Impa, oh gods, Impa. He could only hope he did not run into her on their way to the afterlife. He did not want to have to explain himself to her while they both started on that long road into the darkness.

When his knees collapsed under him for the dozenth time that day, he did not get back up. He just fiddled with the knot at his chest, letting himself breathe deeply as he untied himself from Impa. She rolled off his back, wheezing lightly, still mercifully unaware of herself or her dire situation. Her eyes twitched a little, glossed in sweat, and Link turned toward her, pulling her limp head to his shoulder and running his fingers through her thin, rain-soaked hair. He almost laughed at the thought of them, lying on the mountain like a pair of drowned rats. He didn't even have the strength to drag them to the nearest copse of trees, or to find them a convenient cave to die in. No, they would lie here, under the open Eldine sky, waiting for whatever might come.

 _Maybe when the wolves are finished with Epona they'll come for me,_ Link thought. _It's all I deserve._

He let out a choked sob. In the thick, fresh rain, he could barely smell the stench of her wound. He almost smiled as he felt her cheek against his collarbone—he could hope, hope fervently, she might be able to forgive him for all this. "I'm sorry," he rasped. "Tomorrow…" but he couldn't finish. He knew what tomorrow would bring, and it wasn't Kakariko.

So he closed his eyes. He let the water rush through his hair and soak his clothes, he let the electric air fill his nostrils, he reveled in the senses of his body for the last time, even the pain—the ache of his muscles, the subdued throbbing of his broken hand, the stinging of his blisters and cuts and bruises, the numbness of his split ear, the omnipresent tingling of the sensitive scars on his lips, the chill that crept through his skin to his very bones.

"Thank you," he whispered in her ear. He didn't know what else to tell her, to tell this magnificent, beautiful woman who had sprung into his life when he didn't know he needed her most, who had liberated him from his silence and servitude and given him worth; this woman who had taught him all he knew, who had shared her family with him, who had shown him tenderness and sternness in equal measure. So he just rested his head against hers, not bothering to suppress the weak smile that spread over his face. His breath slowed, his eyes shut of their own accord, and a deep, comfortable sleep overtook him.

* * *

He knew the wolves would come. When he sensed a wet nose over his, sniffing at his skin, he couldn't say he was surprised. They would start with his face and move downward, opening his neck and chest, pulling out what nourishment they could from his abdomen, ripping muscle from bone. While he did not particularly want to be awake for this process, he came to realize he wasn't quite awake at all. His eyes remained closed, as they should be in death, but he could see without light the shape of a wolfish head above him.

Black fur, red eyes, a curious, honest look… With a wave of regret he realized he recognized the animal. He had hoped to meet it again someday, but he supposed now was not the best time for him—he needed to move on, to get going.

But the wolf continued to sniff at his skin, blowing air across his eyelids like a common hound.

 _Do you want to go home?_ The voice was familiar—he had heard it at Eldin's peak. It was the first voice he'd heard in his life.

 _Yes_.

Then he remembered what this particular wolf had said to him more than a year ago, when he had been picked up and carried aloft by that terrible, preternatural wind in the temple, when the spirit had bitten his throat and torn something from him, leaving him exhausted and frightened and miraculously able to hear.

 _The only way home is in death_.

Link had known it then, and he knew it now. But he could not stop himself from mouthing the words, All Sheikah can find their way home. All Sheikah. All…

The wolf backed off momentarily, tilting its head and perking its ears. _You are not prepared_.

Link did not quite know what the wolf meant, but he was at least sure he could agree with it. _I know. I have failed._

The animal just turned its tail, padding away from him, back into that uncanny light, the weird, painful golden glow that seemed to descend from the grey sky toward him. _Father Oak and Mother Larch, Brother Fawn and Sister Wolf, this is the Child of Farore's Light I see. Bless him and let him perish not under my sky._ The wolf shook its shaggy coat, ears twitching. _Eldin has seen too much bloodshed already._

A horrible pain crept down Link's arm—his good one, dammit—and settled somewhere inside his palm. He wanted to reach over and scratch it, to pick it from his skin and pull it from his muscle, to alleviate the ache. But his right arm sat bound and useless across his chest. His whole body lay unresponsive—he seemed to be outside himself, stuck in place and unable to force his body to move.

The wolf seemed indifferent to his plight. Link did not have a mouth with which to cry out, so he could not draw its attention to his suffering. He was suddenly voiceless, suddenly without his uncanny lightless sight. Everything around him went dark again, and he lost his image of the wolf, of the sky, of that great, awful light that descended on him and forced his burning hand to clench, forced his heart to trip over itself in his chest.

He lost all feeling in his arms and legs, and his heart slowed, his muscles relaxed, a strange warmth overtook him. He could not feel Impa beside him, much less his own body. Perhaps she had gone ahead of him. He would have to catch up if he wanted to meet her at the black riverside where souls congregated, the first waymarker on the infinite path that would lead them, inevitably, back home.


	62. Skilled Hands

"Sheikah sensibilities regarding reciprocity are absolute. If one owes you a favor, rest assured they will repay it; though they don't tend to disclose when or how. They have adopted these rules from their guardian gods and spirits, who give no gifts that have not been earned, bestow no blessings that are not warranted. This paradigm is illustrated most transparently in Sheikah magic: any member of the tribe will tell you there is no spell they can cast that doesn't come an equal price."

Irene Carlov, _Mysteries of Foreign Magic_

* * *

"Oh no. No, no, _no_." Palo's voice echoed across the hillside like a mourning wolf's howl.

Talporom's heart almost squeezed right out of his chest to follow the young man down the nearest narrow precipice. Palo slid down the rocks, dislodging soil and saplings as he steadied himself. A few times, Talporom thought he might lose his balance and shatter his bones across the rocks below, but through some spirit's mercy, he made it safely to the bottom. He jumped from the rocks to the small, flat clearing, treeless and rain-soaked. Talporom eased himself down the cliffside after him, a little more careful with his aching old bones. He kept his feet and face steady, kept his thoughts from rushing ahead of him. He would not let his fatherly unease lead him to conclusions he could not accept. He would not let himself catch the fever of fear that had enticed Palo down that dangerous cliff.

By the time he had slid to the bottom, steady, impartial, calm (or so he told himself), Palo had turned over both bodies. "They're alive," he called back, voice shaking with relief. The gods had smiled on Palo by sending a freezing torrent of rain over him—Talporom knew the man would not let himself be seen crying. "Talporom… look at her, though."

Talporom did not want to look at her. He did not want to look on her sunken and greenish features, didn't want to see her body shiver in agony, didn't want to smell the terrible stench rising from the bandages across her chest. But he knelt beside her anyway, biting his lip. He set his staff aside and slowly peeled back her terribly applied bandage (some sort of article of clothing by the looks of it), and saw exactly what he did not want to see. Bundled leaves of what looked to be a common weed poked from dried blood and pus, framing the red and swollen flesh almost like a garnish. Just staring at the hideous infection, and at what he knew were Link's failed attempts to dress it, made Talporom a little sick. He could not name the emotions that stirred in him when he saw the injury—nausea, primarily, followed by terror, then rage, then terror again.

He just grit his teeth and replaced the bandage. He had seen worse, he could deal with worse—or at least he told himself. But he couldn't do it with the herbs he had now, he couldn't do it without help. He leaned in and cupped Impa's clammy shoulder, slid an arm under her knees and stood. She dangled limp in his arms, far too thin and far too easy to carry. Her head fell back, her throat constricting, and she let out a tiny, wavering rasp, a sound too close to those he'd heard from many patients he'd lost in the past. He squeezed her, a ripple of freezing dread spreading from his heart outward.

"You carry Link," Talporom said. "We're taking them to the elder."

"Can't guarantee I won't drop him on his head," Palo answered, but bent down to pull the unconscious Hylian from the stones. "What the hell is this thing…" Talporom turned to see Palo dangling what appeared to be some convoluted contraption of rope and torn clothing, all cross-woven and bow-looped. "The kid's good at tying knots, that's for sure," the deadseer muttered.

"Look at his arm, Palo," Talporom said. "Do you think he could've carried her across the mountains without something like that?"

"You think he carried her all the way here?"

"Maybe not all the way." Talporom lowered his eyes to his daughter's sunken face. "But she's in a bad way, Palo—you can smell her wound even through the rain. My guess is she hasn't been able to walk for a while."

Palo pulled the young Hylian onto his back, stepping over the knotty contraption of rope and cloth. Talporom could see from the state of the boy's clothes he had mostly made it from his own garments. "What about that horse?" Palo asked. "We can get her to carry them."

"You trust a horse to safely carry them to Kakariko?"

"Shit, after what I've seen her do, I'd trust her with anything."

Palo did have a point. After they had escaped the Capital and avoided Haema and his band of riders, chased Link and Impa across the fields of Lanayru, relying on nothing but rudimentary tracking methods (and information from one very angry farmer who claimed that a strange Hylian boy dressed in finery had raided his garden and inexplicably broken all of his milk pots), they had expected to find at least the horse to have stayed behind in the fields, growing happy and fat on the lush landscape. They had not expected to find its tracks and dung quite so far up in the mountains, but it appeared the pair had ridden the beast into the hills—or more likely, had tried to abandon it and failed. Talporom figured a horseman of such repute as the King's stableboy would know better than to urge his animal up the scree, especially bareback, with one hand in a sling and the burden of a sick companion. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe the boy was as devoid of common sense as he was of apparent medical knowledge. _Maybe I should teach him a thing or two about healing,_ Talporom found himself thinking, looking at his daughter's poorly-dressed wound.

Some way or another, the horse had appeared to follow Link and Impa. As Talporom and Palo traversed slopes he would think impossible for any ungulate but a mountain goat, they kept seeing the signs of the horse's presence. And when they came to the last peak before Eldin, Talporom had thrown out his certainty that the horse was indeed a mundane horse and reconsidered the possibility it might be a spirit.

Two dead wolves and a trail of blood—he examined the creatures and found their skulls dented and their bones broken. At first he was certain the blood was his daughter's, but when he strode to the lee side of the mountain and peered into the sparsely forested valley below, he saw a red figure, head down, mane and tail whiter than the clouds in the distance. He had glanced again to the wolves before sprinting down the opposite slope, Palo stumbling behind him—"What the _hell_ kind of monster is that horse?"

Like many Sheikah, Palo had always sympathized with and admired wolves—especially the solitary ones, who wandered mateless through the night, howling for the dead. But Talporom was not quite ready to pity the hunters, not until he was certain it was not his daughter's blood that stained the rocks of the descending slope. He knew his fear was, as most of his parental worries, unfounded. Wolves generally knew better than to stalk and kill those who walked on two legs—at least not since the Ordishmen came up from the south with their crossbows and swords, killing any and all predators that dared trespass on their cultivated fields. But then again, he could not guess what a starving and desperate animal might do to survive.

His fears were assuaged when he skidded to a stop at the bottom of the slope, knees aching with the effort (he considered starting using Bonesetter as his walking stick, but the staff demanded more respect than that). The horse, perking her ears toward him when he heard him coming, moved away slightly, one leg raised, fetlock swollen. He saw a streak of blood on her side, the punctures of teeth on her haunches, and noted the dried blood that had dripped down her legs to the ground below. Though the horse—decidedly female—was larger than any he'd seen before, it appeared a normal horse. No spirit could bleed like that, at least as far as he knew.

When he approached, she threw her head, placing her bad leg to the ground and making as if to charge him. Her white tail streaked and flicked, her ears lowered against her head, her eyes shot wide and locked on his, as if she could stare him into the ground.

"You really are some horse, aren't you?" Talporom said. He moved slowly, keeping his voice gentle and hoping his old man's rasp would soothe rather than scare her.

"Horse?" Palo said, seating himself on the nearest rock. "That animal is a goddamn mountain goat." He stilled himself and let Talporom do the moving. "How many miles do you think she's walked on that bad foot?"

"Hard to tell," Talporom said. He crept slowly to the side of the horse, approaching her where she could see him. Her tail stopped flicking and one ear poked forward. "Did you lose the two people with you?" he asked.

The horse backed off, stumbling over rocks and roots, and turned to go.

"Well, don't make her feel guilty about it," Palo said.

Talporom did not get close enough to the animal to even think about soothing her with touch. She disappeared into a clump of trees, limping into the shadows with a desultory wave of her white tail.

"Do you think she wants us to follow her?" Palo asked, pulling himself to his feet.

"If she does, she wants us to go the wrong way." He made for the opposite slope, away from the horse. "If either Link or Impa have any sense in them at all, they'd make for Mount Eldin. Surely you don't doubt their intelligence that much."

"Impa's no," Palo answered. "Link's, well… no. The kid's cleverer than anyone gives him credit for." He shook his head. "But still so incredibly stupid."

"I will be pleased to find they have reached Kakariko before we do."

"Impa's probably carrying him blindfolded through the forest now." Palo fell silent for a moment. "Though I'm surprised he'd leave the horse behind."

Talporom glanced behind him to see the horse in question emerge from the trees, limping after them. "She's not so dumb. She's letting us show her the way."

Palo turned his head and peered down the incline. "If that limping oaf manages to follow us all the way to Kakariko, I'll crown her queen of Hyrule."

There was no crowning necessary. Halfway across Eldin's wide base, they had lost her, and unwilling to slow their pace for the sake of a lame horse, continued on without hesitation. Now, even as they were the designated beasts of burden, carrying the limp bodies back to the village, there was no sign of her. It was probably for the better. Kakariko did not have stables, it probably did not have the means to care for such an animal. And Talporom didn't have the time or energy to regret her fate. It was a shame to waste a horse so magnificent, but he couldn't linger on thoughts of her. He had his daughter to worry about now.

* * *

Talporom's returns to Kakariko were sporadic, invariably unannounced, and occurred only every one to four years. But even for an event so rare, Irma had an uncanny, almost practiced way of sensing it. She rushed from her house as he stepped onto the first path leading out from the graveyard, hair flying, still shoeless, with her skirt hiked around her knees. She called his name as she approached, grin widening, eyes shining. She slid to a halt when she saw her daughter dangling in his arms, her smile vanished, and her back arched like a cat's, hair rising in frightened hackles. "Talporom," she whispered. "Is that… why…"

"Where's Talm?" he asked.

"Out hunting—"

"Come with us to the elder's cave," he told her. He did not stop to greet her properly, as a husband should, but just continued up the hill toward Merel's abode, increasing his pace as the cave came into view.

"Do you need anything, any herbs, or—" She trotted beside him, a worried fist clutched to her breast.

"Merel will have what we need."

She slowed, bewildered, as he passed her, trotting up the slope. Palo lagged a little under his own burden, but he followed closely. Irma turned her eyes to him and Link, limp and half dead on his back, and her eyes widened anew. "Evening, ma'am," Palo said.

The elder's cave was, as always when she predicted visitors' arrival, full of light and warmth. The woman herself tottered from her back room, gnarled hands folded contentedly, stopping to stand by the roaring fire.

"Come in, Talporom," she said.

He readjusted his daughter in his arms. "Elder, I—"

"I know. I have laid out mats in the medicine room. And Palo, thank you for bringing Talporom back to me. Though I don't remember asking."

"Yes, well, you can punish me later," Palo said. "For now—"

"Follow me." With an infuriatingly slow shuffle, she led them into one of the darker, smaller passages of her labyrinthine abode. It opened into a small, torchlit chamber, stone shelves stocked with leaves and herbs, oils and pastes. In its center lay two mats—a display of preparation Talporom knew should not surprise him. The elder always knew who was coming and for what.

"Merel," he said, laying his daughter down on the nearest. "Merel, I—"

"I know you do not trust yourself with her, Talporom," she said. She knelt beside Impa's twitching body, rolling up her long sleeves. "Her situation is dire, but not irreparable. You are wise enough to know her state is delicate, and I can't have you scare yourself into a mistake. Palo, bring me the basin." As soon as he dropped Link on the opposite mat, he reached for a bowl of blessed water on the nearest shelf. He brought it over, spilling a little, and knelt at her side, offering it. She dipped her wrinkled hands inside and shook them gently. "Palo will assist me. You and Irma will take care of Link."

Talporom nodded, but Irma seemed reluctant to leave her daughter's side. She wrung her hands, head lowered. "But, Elder—"

Talporom gripped her elbow and pulled her to him, forcing her eyes away from her daughter and onto his. He looked into the dark blue of her irises, infinite in their kindness, and cupped both her cheeks. Gods bless her heart, she had such love, such strength, but she did frighten so easily. He pressed his lips to hers, perhaps a little too forcefully, but it seemed to shake her from her state of wide-eyed panic. "I would trust no one else to save our daughter," Talporom said. He knew better than to tell Irma to not worry about her firstborn, the older of two candles that supplied the light to their life. She worried as much as he did to see that candle snuffed out, and empty words could not change that.

Irma gathered herself, taking a deep breath, and peeled Talporom's hands from her cheeks. She swallowed, put on a steely frown, and blinked some sense back into herself. "What do you need?" she asked.

"First, I need the basin," he answered, kneeling beside the boy. She rushed over to Palo and Merel, lingering just a moment before bringing the water back to Talporom. She lay it at his side as he started to undo the boy's waistcoat. It wasn't too hard to cut the clothes off him (though Talporom had to hesitate to marvel at the weirdness of seeing him in such inordinately expensive costume)—they were already torn near to shreds, but he still had to enlist Irma's help when pulling the cloth from his injured arm.

On the boy's back, shoulders and stomach were the raised scars and healed stripes indicative of the simpler methods of torture. He was dotted with the expected scrapes and bruises of mountain climbing, but he had more than a few curious scars—most notably a series of symmetric punctures through his upper and lower lips. All the wounds had closed long ago, and very obviously without assistance from any sort of physician. Talporom raised his eyes to Irma's, meeting her glance with equal worry. The unspoken certainty that their own daughter shared similar wounds passed between them, but they did not rush over to check. Talporom just bent and started to unwind the cloth over Link's hand.

What he saw bewildered him. When he pulled the makeshift bandage away, hard with crusted blood, he had to stare at the mangled thing in a moment of awe. Beside him, Irma let out a short gasp, hand rising to her mouth. He did not know a man could break his hand so thoroughly—perhaps via some machine in the palace's dungeon. He saw no lacerations where metal might dig into the skin, no teeth marks where some animal may have taken hold—but that could be because there was so little left unbroken.

"Basin," he croaked, and Irma held it up for him. He dipped his fingers in the holy water, entreating wordlessly to the spirits for the blessing of a steady hand, and shook them off. He bent over the boy's mangled wrist and turned it in his gentle grip, searching for any place where he could start the rebuilding process. It appeared no essential parts of the hand were missing, just… horribly misplaced. There was some structure left in the palm itself—if he turned his head and narrowed his eyes he could guess its shape, but the fingers… The hand had already partially healed into its obscene shape, and he did not know if he would be able to undo the damage Link's own well-meaning body had caused.

"We might have to cut it off," he said. Irma's brown eyebrows inverted themselves, her mouth hung slightly open, but the look of horror passed when he continued, "If Bonesetter fails me." He balanced back on his heels, knees cracking, and pulled his staff from its leather strap on his back. "Irma, I'll need you to hold him down. This won't be pleasant for any of us."

She nodded and scooted to the boy's opposite side. He showed her where to place her knee, her hands, where to put her weight when the kid would inevitably feel his hand being re-broken. She stretched herself above Link, mousy hair falling over her face, and he could hear her mouthing an apology to the boy. She was thin and accustomed to gentleness, but she was not weak (no woman who could haul stews of the size she usually made could ever be called weak). He had no doubt she'd be able to keep him still while he did his work.

He lay the boy's hand as flat as he could manage, and steadied the butt of Bonesetter above it. "Gods damn," he muttered to himself, then, to the other side of the room: "Merel, Palo, it will get loud over here."

"Very well," Merel replied. She hunched over Impa's infection—how she could lean so close to such a devastating smell evaded even Talporom, and he had seen some pretty poisonous injuries in his day.

He just gulped, steadying his staff, and closed his eyes. He always avoided using magic when he could—pain, like all things, was a conserved quantity, and the worse a wound, the worse toll it took on him. He was getting old, he barely had the strength to endure healing injuries he would've breezed through twenty years ago. But he had not killed himself yet—he had not forced himself to fix something that in turn damaged him permanently. He had managed worse, he could manage this.

He called on a familiar bluish light—at least he imagined it as light, but it was in truth something much more bizarre and intangible—into his hands. His breath came cold from his mouth, and his fingers prickled with the heightened sensation of his own energy as he gripped the length of his staff. He stared at the mangled limb under him, imagining where everything should go, walking himself through the mental image of a healthy hand, of knuckles and sinews and fingers, of muscle and veins and skin, of the levers and pulleys in the anatomical machine. He grit his teeth, pouring energy into the length of Bonesetter, and with a grunt of effort, smashed its end into the mess of the boy's hand.

As expected, he struggled. It wasn't an awakening Talporom would wish on anyone, but when the boy threw his head back and screamed in hoarse, agonized bursts, he just continued driving the butt of his staff into the bones, concentrating on what _should_ be, imagining water flowing from Bonesetter's wood into Link's muscles, imagining ice creaking along his bones, forcefully setting them into their proper places and shapes.

Even Irma cried out a few times as she held him down. She kept apologizing to him, reassuring him, but in his half-conscious, weak and panicked state, he could not hear her. He just moaned and tossed his head as Talporom rearranged his hand, snapping and grinding and ignoring the pain in his own arms and head. He channeled every ounce of energy he could muster through the sacred wood of his staff, gritting his teeth against the resistance.

He had taught his daughters all they could learn about medicine, but he could not teach them this. He could not show them the blue, intangible conduits through which he drew his magic, he could not describe to them the power, the almost exhilarating pain at mending a wound. Such secrets were reserved for those who wore the tattoos of a healer, who could tap into the spiritual lifeblood of the world. It was this blood that filled Talporom now, stinging him as if it were his own, flowing out of him as if through his own wounds. It poured from the bottom of his staff into the broken hand, snapping bones, peeling back skin and sinew, restoring with icy pain the rightness of the limb. It froze over the boy's hand in a white light, cracking, resetting, glowing—tearing through Talporom's muscles with white-cold pain, icing over his knuckles, jolting through his old bones—

When he let go of his staff, nearly gasping in relief, he saw below him a limp appendage, arguably recognizable as a hand, with five fingers, a palm, a wrist, ripped and blotched skin, and more than a few bumps where the muscle had swelled or atrophied entirely. It wasn't the best he could've hoped for, it wasn't even decent, in his opinion, but it was all he could do. He set the staff aside and looked over to Irma, who shook above Link, still holding his arm. When his breathing slowed enough to allow it, he told her to let go. She did, and the boy stayed still—he did not seem too eager to wake up again, not after what had greeted him the last time.

Talporom leaned forward on his knees and examined his work more closely. The bones would be soft, the muscles underdeveloped, the skin swollen and red for a long time to come. He had put everything back where it approximately belonged, at least. Now he would have to make sure it stayed that way while the hand healed on its own.

"Irma," he panted. He wiped a drop of sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. "I need the small splints. Five—no, eight—hell, all of them. They're on the shelf next to the—get them too, those purple leaves in the glass jar. And the oil next to it."

She did as he asked, and he submerged the leaves in the oil for a few minutes before laying them on the boy's limp hand. He always found it disturbing the way a newly-healed limb lay pliable and soft, like it had no bones at all. "Bandages, the thin ones, please. And the sap. The one in the squat jar there." He had never known if the stuff was actual tree sap, but it sure looked and felt like it—until it hardened into a resilient solid that took a chisel to break.

For the next hour or two—he couldn't really tell—he aligned all the boy's fingers, one after the other, taking extra care with the thumb. He lay down splints and poured sap and wrapped length after length of bandage until it looked like he had swaddled a small spring melon in white cloth. He had to add a few more splints to the bones above the palm, but with some probing he deduced whatever damage had been done to the wrist would heal on its own. He lay down one final length of wood to hold the whole thing straight against Link's forearm, and with a sigh, leaned back into the waiting arms of his wife.

"Some of his fingers are crooked," he whispered. "I don't know if they'll function completely but at least he'll have a hand at all. For now… he'll learn to use his left."

"He always uses his left," Irma replied, wrapping her arms around his waist. Of course Irma would remember something like that.

Talporom smiled. "Well, no harm done then." He turned his head and kissed her cheek. "Thank you, Irma. I could not ask for a better assistant."

On the other side of the room, Merel leaned over his daughter, hands lying still across her slowly rising chest. It always amazed him how the elder had never needed a conduit for her magic, she could just lay her hands on the worst of injuries and mutter a few words, and it would come away clean and healthy. Her face never betrayed the pain of the act, and even now, with her age and frailty to hold her back, she showed nothing but competency and dedication to her task. Talporom was suddenly glad he left Impa to the care of the old woman. She was still a better healer than he could ever hope to be.

Beside her, Palo knelt, mouth drawn taut, handing her everything she asked for. The young man cursed under his breath the entire time, muttering insults, threats to kill Link for his shoddy attempts to heal her—and infinite in her patience, Merel worked through the babble undisturbed. Talporom and Irma sat in silence as the elder finished her job, getting Palo to lift Impa's shoulders as she wrapped new, clean bandages loosely around the wound. When her work was finally finished, she sighed and sat back, breath slowing. Palo handed her the wash basin and she wiped her hands clean of blood and other fluids. The overpowering stench of Impa's wound had nearly disappeared under the scents of myriad herbs and oils—sweet, sour, bitter, ugly. It was an olfactory cacophony that could confound the senses, but it was better than the smell of sickness.

When Palo drained and refilled the basin from a large reservoir jutting from the wall, Talporom dipped his hands inside, letting the pain soak from his aching bones. He stared at his hands, his bitten nails and blue veins, and marveled at how large his knuckles had become. He supposed soon they'd look like the elder's—if he could get his own gnarled things to be half as competent as hers, he'd be happy with them.

Merel stood, shaking on her feet, but Palo held her arm, steadying her. "We have done all we can," she said. Even she could not hide the exhaustion in her voice. "I will stay and watch over them. We can only wait, and hope they both wake up hungry." She wiped her hands on the front of her blue robe. "I know I am."

"I can make us all something," Irma said.

"Oh, Irma, you've worked too hard today," Merel replied.

"Make Talm do it," the deadseer suggested.

Talporom felt his wife's hand squeeze his arm as they made their way out of the cave. "Talm doesn't know what happened, Talporom. We can't possibly tell her about her sister and then demand she feed us all."

"Maybe Gwen, then?" Palo said.

"Gwen?" Irma smiled tiredly. "That woman still can't cook worth her own salt. She's so used to having a servant to do it for her."

Talporom nudged her, narrowing his eyes.

"Oh, the princess' mother—she's quite sweet, actually. You haven't met them yet, have you?" Irma leaned her head against his shoulder. "You've a house full of Hylians, Talporom."

He squeezed her back. "I was prepared for that outcome when I married you."

"Yes, well, you're not quite prepared for this breed of Hylian."

"I'd love to see how Talporom and Shaddon get on," Palo said. "I'd bet my pipe they fistfight within the first five minutes."

"Please," Irma said, "my husband has more control over himself than that."

When they reached the mouth of the cave, they stopped to gaze down the slope toward the village. Each of them froze, glued in place by the odd sight at the base of the hill. The men and women of the village below crept from their houses to stand some distance away from the sight, muttering to one another and staring widely. Tall on three good legs, shaking her mane and examining her surroundings, stood the fire-red charger.

Talporom turned to Palo, taking in the young man's bewildered stare. He could not help himself, could not help the tired smile that pulled at his mouth. "Well, Palo, it looks like Hyrule has a new queen."


	63. The Only True Story

"My mother told me what the priests used to say during the Faronian Uprising, how they used to sit on the corner and shout prophecies of a boy in green, chosen by the people and the gods, who would overthrow my father and reestablish order in the city. I told her it was a stupid story, but she just said the people of this land had lived off of stupid stories like that for centuries. She said that prophecy was the reason they hated my father so much. But when we looked at each other, I swear we both almost laughed (almost). There were many reasons the people hated my father. There were many reasons we did, too, and prophecies had nothing to do with any of them."

From the unpublished diaries of Mandrag Garona

* * *

Slowly, with streaks of equal numbness and pain, Link regained feeling of his own body. The cold ache in his back, the churning of hunger in his stomach, the soreness in his feet, the caked dryness of his lips and eyes, the throbbing pain in his hand… he let out a groan. He remembered the paralyzing cold of the rain, a wet nose against his skin, the howling of wolves… he remembered the King's face, a dark room, a needle puncturing his lips, once, twice, over again, and a blinding golden light, piercing through his hand and heart, filling his sight with searing, unbearable brightness.

His eyes cracked open, splitting the hardened gunk around them, and from behind his closed lips he released a pathetic moan. He saw darkness above him, black rock, pock-marked and lit slightly with the dim fire of a torch. And he knew he was in that room again, weighed down on the altar, deep in the palace's dungeons, miles from light and sky and freedom—

He sat up with a gasp. Sharp pain flooded his body, nearly blinding him, and he struggled against it, struggled to push himself from the ground, to escape. But a hand, firm and gentle, pressed against his forehead. He succumbed to its pressure and fell back down, panic gradually leaving him, ushering in instead waves of confusion. He blinked and his vision cleared; it was not Barudi who leaned over him, it was not the flashing white teeth of a hungry wolf.

"Irma…" he croaked. He struggled to recall how he had gotten here, why Irma was here in the King's dungeon, no—why she was here in the mountains, yes, the mountains. Gods, he'd done something wrong, so terribly _wrong_ , but he couldn't remember what it was. The certainty of his own mistakes reverberated in his skull, voices of accusation, but he couldn't pin them down to listen to them. He couldn't recall his exact crimes, but he knew he owed her some sort of apology.

"I'm… sorry," he croaked. "I… lost my hat."

Irma's sweet laugh coaxed him out of his haze of confusion. Piece by piece, he tried to reassemble his memory while Irma grounded him, holding his left hand and stroking the back of it. "It's all right, Link. I'll make you another. I'll make you a whole ensemble to match." She turned from him for a moment—he feared he might lose her in the shadows, but she returned to lay a scented cloth on his forehead, stroking back his hair and tucking it behind his ears. "Are you hungry? I brought some bread—maybe you'd like something softer. I can go back down to the house and get something else."

He shook his head as images filed into it, one by one, nonsensical and inconsecutive, piecing together parts of a story he did not quite understand. He saw Epona, he saw wolves, he felt the pounding of rain on his head and chest, and his hand, gods, his hand… He glanced to it, wrapped tightly across his chest and affixed in a splint—just looking at it sent throbbing pain up his arm nearly to his shoulder. He raised his eyes to Irma's, large and blue and pleading, and he suddenly remembered he was supposed to answer her.

"Bread… is fine," he said.

She nodded and leaned away for a moment, returning with a soft, sweet-smelling loaf, which she broke for him. She helped him sit up, removing the cloth from his head and propping pillows and skins underneath his aching back, holding his shoulder as he tried to steady himself. His head swirled but he took the bread anyway, thankful for anything that would stop the angry roaring of his stomach. He took a bite, and with each chew managed to recall a little more of recent events.

"Impa?" he asked, mouth still full.

"She's over there. She's still asleep and—well, we've done all we can." Irma lowered her eyes and an uncharacteristic frown passed over her face.

Link felt unconscionably sick all of a sudden. He forced himself to swallow, turning to look at Impa, lying still as death on her back only a dozen feet away. Her face was still sunken and gaunt, her brittle hair smoothed back from her wet forehead. She barely looked any better than she'd been when he'd carried her through the mountains.

"How did I…" he started. "Did I find my way back?"

"You've Palo and my husband to thank," Irma answered. "When the princess and her family arrived without you, Palo took it on himself to find out where you both were. They followed you into the mountains."

"So Zelda's—"

"Fine. Fine and happy. She and her parents are staying with me."

Link sighed and looked up at the ceiling, again unsure which gods to thank.

"You slept for the better part of a day. You just needed a good rest. Impa needs more; her wound was cleaned and drained, her bandages changed—the elder has made an awful paste for her that she practically force feeds her. It's horrible to watch." Irma's face fell and she glanced over at her daughter. "We were taking turns watching over you both. It's so hard to just wait, knowing you can't do anything—" she stopped herself. "But here I am, babbling at you. What matters is that you're here. Impa's here. Even your horse is here."

Link nearly spat out his next bite. "E-Epona? She made it?"

Irma nodded. "Talporom found her all scratched up with a turned ankle. Left a trail of dead wolves in her wake. So he let me fix her up—this old farm girl still knows a thing or two about animals, you know." She paused to lay a hand on his cheek, no doubt charmed by his wide eyes and the piece of bread dangling from his mouth. "She's made quite the impression on the village. The children adore her—especially those who've never seen a horse before. They think she's some strange, fearless doe. But I don't have a stable for her, you know. Only that old shed for the goat. Some of the villagers built a lean-to, but she has to wander pretty far out for grass. The village has never been a place for a horse… then again, no horses can usually make the climb to begin with."

Link swallowed and finally regained his voice. "She's…"

"An extraordinary creature, but I'm sure you know that."

Talporom strode into the room, and after briefly glancing at his daughter, stepped over to Link and knelt beside him.

He seemed indifferent to his awakening. He just looked over his bandaged arm, frowning thoughtfully. "How is your hand?" he asked.

"It hurts," Link admitted.

"Good. Then at least you have some feeling in it." He rose for a moment and reached out to the shelves carved into the wall. He returned with a small jar of something brown and thick. He held it to Link's lips, nudging it against his face a little forcefully. "Drink this. It will turn your stomach but you must swallow all of it." Link did not have time to protest, or even ask what it was, before the physician twisted the cap and practically dumped it into his mouth. The taste was so horrid Link swore it actually burned his tongue as it poured down his throat, but he just made a face and held it down. He immediately tried to banish the putrid feeling from his mouth with another bite of sweet bread, but it lingered as bad tastes are wont to do, tingling at the back of his mouth and on the inside of his cheeks.

"Now," Talporom started. "You need to tell me what happened. All of it. You need to tell me how you ended up on the executioner's block, and how my daughter ended up the way she is."

Link knew he could not back out of this. He knew he could not lay his head on his pillows and let tiredness overtake him. He knew Talporom would not let him rest until he had walked him through the story. So Link told him about Sheim and his list, about Innar, Galra and Nabru, about their long and tiring search (he skipped his arduous days in the city records hall, because no one needed to hear the details of such a boring venture), about meeting Shaddon and his family, about the false starts and sad endings, about the princess' success at leaving the city and he and Impa's failure to.

"It was my fault," he concluded.

Talporom raised an eyebrow. There was an implicit agreement in the gesture—it didn't take a genius to guess whose fault it had been, to surmise which of the two of them was more likely to slip up and jeopardize the delicate operation. "So you were taken to the palace dungeons," Talporom finished the story for him. "After which you were wheeled to the public execution block, where you escaped on that horse of yours. No need to look confused. I was there."

Link's heart skipped a beat. "Were you the one that threw the smoke bomb?"

"Palo did. We came to look for you in the city when you didn't show up, and only found you when you were already on your way out. We followed you as fast as we could, but we didn't find you until we already thought it was too late."

Link hung his head. "I'm sorry… I didn't make it back."

"I wouldn't have expected you to. The mountains are harsh, and you're not Sheikah. But you did get remarkably far, especially considering your injuries. From the marks on you, it looks like you were interrogated. What did you tell them?"

"Nothing. I lied and said we planned for an Ordishwoman to take the throne."

Talporom narrowed his eyes. "Did you give a name? The last thing we want to do is rush to rescue an innocent woman before the King gets to her."

Link shook his head. "No. No names."

"Good." Talporom reached out toward him, a large but gentle finger easing toward his lips. "And what are these scars from—"

Link pulled away with a ferocity that surprised even him. Despite his weakness, he was quick to flinch, quick to put a protective hand over his mouth—though he couldn't recall why he should have to. The damage was done, Barudi was far away, but still, his lips burned when images of her needle flashed through his mind.

" _Talporom_ ," Irma hissed, squeezing her husband's arm.

He retracted his hand, frowning. "Perhaps it was unkind to ask. Forgive me. When you are ready, you can tell the elder everything." A shiver coursed through Link, imbued with the mild shame of his sudden fear, his inexplicable horror at the man's touch. "But I am curious," the physician continued. "Why would a boy such as yourself be dressed in such fine attire, especially on the day of his execution?"

Link averted his eyes. "The King gave them to me."

"Why?"

"Because…" Link was unsure how to explain his perplexing history with the monarch. He looked at his dressed hand, frowning, sweating under Talporom's piercing stare. "Because he thought he could entice me to his side. He thought… he thought that if he did that, I might be useful to him. Or at least not a danger to him."

He could almost taste Talporom's incredulity—or at least he would've if the disgusting flavor of that brown liquid did not still coat his whole mouth. "Useful to him? In what way?"

"The King says… he says…" It almost hurt to speak the words. It was nothing short of vulgar, giving himself credit as the King did, declaring himself some sort of threatening, powerful man, when he had no right to. "He thinks that… I'll take part of his family's treasure from him. A piece of that golden power that sits in the palace. He thinks I might be able to use it."

When Talporom's eyes widened and a terrifying frown crept over his face, Link was suddenly certain he had made a mistake. When he met the physician's intense red eyes—a piercing gaze he shared with his daughter—he knew Talporom's incredulity was warranted. Link did not want to lie to the man, but in a rush of self-doubt, he considered the possibility the King had never said anything of the sort to him, that it was all some sort of egotistical hallucination on his part.

Talporom just pushed himself off the ground and turned, making for the door. Link nearly crawled after him; he leaned after the retreating man, wishing he hadn't said anything, wishing he could call Talporom back and make him listen to the truth, the actual truth, that the King was most definitely wrong.

"Talporom, I'm not," he called after the man. Irma just sat beside him, one hand clenching his elbow, eyes locked on her husband. He did not turn, he didn't falter, despite Link's insistence. "Whatever the King thinks I am, I'm not!" His protests did not stop Talporom from disappearing through the doorway, silent and swift. Link leaned, voice hoarse, shouting after him, wishing for him to hear the truth, to turn and acknowledge that Link regretted what he'd said. "I'm _not_!"

Irma was there to shush him. She stroked his back as he leaned, bewildered, staring at the shadows where Talporom had disappeared. His mouth hung open, his mind rushed through every possible reason the man might get up and leave in the middle of his explanation, but he found none. He just muttered to himself once more, despondent, "I'm not."

"Calm down, Link, it's okay," Irma cooed. She ran long fingers through his hair, tucking it behind his ears, stroking his cheek with her thumb. "Of course you're not."

* * *

"My mother once told me a strange story, Elder Merel."

He had caught her, as he intended, by her fire. This was not the bright, public fire that burned for all to see at the mouth of her cave, but a smaller, more private flame, hidden safely in the far reaches of her own personal chambers. He knew he could find her there, near to the flames that told her best and strongest the fates of all her denizens, the images and sounds that rendered in vague shapes the vicissitudes of the world around her.

The elder turned slowly, her familiar oracular smile widening across her wrinkled face. She did not seem too concerned with his trespass into her private chambers—she probably even waited for him. He hoped, at least, he proved punctual.

"She told you a story?" Merel, untouchable Merel, always taking the high ground, humoring him. "She told me plenty, too. Batty old woman." She paused to wheeze out a laugh.

"No, Merel." Talporom held a finger to his temple and rubbed it. "This one was different. One she told me I'd recognize as soon as I saw it."

That seemed to catch the elder's interest. Her smile disappeared and she raised a white eyebrow.

"It is an old one, forgotten by most, preserved in hundreds of inconstant forms." He was quoting his mother now, her cryptic words spilling from his mouth—nothing more than regurgitated babble. "A story erased and rewritten, repressed and resurgent, one that is spelled in soil more than on paper… Renepa said she'd heard it a thousand times before, and would a thousand times again before she died. She said there are more retellings than stars in the sky, but after you peel away the falseness, the imaginations of its narrators, it tells a simple story." Merel's gnarled hands clasped together in front of her robe, and he could see the hint of a smile play at her lips. "She said it was the only true story in the world."

The elder held her position, eyebrows raised, smile breaking again on her wrinkled face. "The only true story there is, eh?"

"Tell me about the shards of metal—from the desert and the peak of Eldin. The ones Link and Impa found."

"What would you like to know about them?" Her smile infuriated him now, so assured and equivocal.

"What are they?" he almost barked.

"You already know. They are the pen that writes this story in blood. Again and again."

Instinctively he raised a hand to his mouth.

"Stop biting your nails, Talporom. Your mother always hated that."

He lowered his hand, biting instead the inside of his lip. He barely noticed the taste of blood on his tongue. "Then we have more of an advantage than we thought." He rested his hand against his chin, stroking the outlines of his tattoo. "Do we not?"

"No. Not at the moment." She turned back to the fire, hands folded, smile fading. "But the boy will grow. So will the girl. With a little help."

"But, Elder—"

"Just do your best to keep them alive, help them grow strong. And be patient. It is as Palo says—you've got to wait for the firegrass to bud before you smoke it."

Talporom scowled. "Elder, you have to stop listening to Palo. He's ruining your proverbs."

Merel threw back her head and chuckled, wheezing. "On the contrary, he makes them more palatable." The elder sank into her cushions, smile dissipating the tension hovering in the small room. "Your daughter has brought us two vessels of great godly power, Talporom," she said. "Do not worry too much for them. Just be proud that she not only brought us the scion of the royal family, as was commanded, but had the insight to let a deaf stableboy come along. Would you have?"

Talporom lowered his eyes. "No, probably not."

"Admit to yourself, Talporom, that she knows the stories your mother did—Talm too, I would argue. At least to an extent. Though the Dragmire family has erased that particular tale from the public eye, it has passed without words through you to your daughters. They have the good sense to follow fate where it takes them, to repeat the story, the only true story in the world. Look what they have done, and be proud."

Talporom seated himself opposite her, folding his hands and staring into her fire. "I am. More than I can say, I am." He sighed, cupping his forehead with his hand. "Gods… I thought this whole time my mother was talking about the Faronian Uprising."

"She _was_. That was an incomplete iteration of this tale. An interrupted repetition of the story. She was talking about the Faronian Uprising, the skirmishes between Faron and the Gerudo Desert, the bloody founding of this country of Hyrule—she was talking about wars not yet fought, kings not yet usurped. Like she said, she has heard the story a thousand times."

"She told you about it?"

"She…" with a startling suddenness, Merel choked on her words. She laughed a little between coughs, and when she steadied herself again, continued. "That appears to be the property of Eldin. I may not speak of it."

"I understand," Talporom offered, though he didn't. He had not made the ascent himself.

"Just know this, Talporom. Value what you have now. We have a fraction of a blank page before the story repeats, and you may write on it what you wish. You will not have control beyond those few lines—only the gods do. So do not linger on such matters—just promise me you will always be proud of your daughters, no matter what."

"I promise." It was an easy one to make.

"And promise me you will be kind to Link, for courage is a hard thing to nurture. Promise me you will be honest with Zelda, speak to her with wisdom and offer any knowledge she asks of you— _any_ knowledge."

Talporom could not hide the confused wrinkling of his forehead. "I promise, Elder."

"Good. Now, I'm about to soothe these old bones. If you wish to smoke with me, you may stay. If not, the smell will be nigh intolerable."

Talporom stood, shaking his head. "You do need to separate yourself from Palo, Merel."

She smiled as he turned toward the door. "Let an old woman have her pleasures, Talporom. Gods know how long they will last."

* * *

First princes have squires, second princes become them. It was a common saying in Ordona that had rarely been proven untrue. Even when a second prince ascended to the throne in his older brother's place, it was usually after an arduous length of service at another man's side, often an uncle or second cousin.

It was not unprecedented of to have an Ordish second prince serve as squire to the King of Hyrule. What was new was to have him serve under a Gerudo pretender. The High Prince of Ordona professed to caring little who sat on the throne of his neighboring country—and it would certainly be true, if the asses on that throne had been a pleasing shade of Hylian pink. But as it was, Hyrule belonged to a savage line of desert thieves and witches, and no doubt the scandalized nobility of Ordona would weep to see their High Prince's son on his knees before the King, pledging his sword and his life.

Daroen stared at the base of the King's throne as he said his vows, declaiming his loyalty, promising to serve the Crown unto death, to never stray from his King's side and serve with utmost obedience, while Haema stood by with his arms crossed, smiling slightly. The general had been the one to bring the second prince to the Capital as a guest, it had been he who put the idea of squireship into his distant cousin's head, it had been he who painted the first strokes in the King's vision of unity between Hyrule and Ordona. Haema was a diamond in the endless pebble fields of Ordishmen who concerned themselves with nothing more than their own family standing, their own petty skirmishes. Few had the inclination to consider matters greater than their own House, but if Daroen could prove himself to be anywhere near the best of a bad lot, the King would be satisfied. If anything, Haema was skilled at pointing out young men of potential—he had done so with the stableboy, Ganondorf could only hope he'd done the same with Second Prince Daroen.

When Ganondorf bid the young man rise, he asked once more if he was willing to take on his new station even with knowledge of the impending conflict between his home country and Hyrule. Haema had suggested to equivocate, to play down the inevitable clash between the boy's home country and his new one, to ease Daroen into the idea like slowly introducing an animal to a new environment. Barudi, for once, had agreed. But the King could not even by his questionable conscience trick a young man into going to battle with his own country. He could not build an alliance of trust and loyalty on the unfounded certitude that a war between Hyrule and Ordona could be avoided. The King was many things, but he was not a liar.

Daroen pulled himself to his feet and bowed his head. "Sire, I love my people more than I love myself. So it is in my best interest to see them come to their senses, by whatever means. By fulfilling both the roles of your squire and the High Prince's son, I will do my utmost to ensure it will not come to blows. But if it does, my honor and my sword are bound to my vows."

"May you never break them," Ganondorf said. With those words, Daroen was dismissed, ready to familiarize himself with his duties. The King had his own to attend to.

Haema's men had so far failed to recover the stableboy or his companion. Viscen, though he had proved competent both during Ganondorf's campaigns and following his promotion to the leader of the city guard, had brought him several arrestees, none of which he could confidently say had helped the boy escape. None were Sheikah, and though a few confessed under duress to have harbored a few subversive opinions, they had nothing of relevance to say. It was not unexpected, and Ganondorf did not need their confessions. He knew where the stableboy was headed, and the place could not be found unless one already knew the way.

He couldn't trouble himself too much about the stableboy. Though each time he thought of the young man's face his blood boiled, he could do nothing but cling to Barudi's insistence that like the waters of the eternal river of life, he would return. He would return to him like a dog slinking guiltily back to its master; then, Ganondorf would have justice and Barudi would have the heart she desired so much. But for now, the best the King could do was hope the echoes would die down.

Citizens spoke of a madman, a demon, riding a fire-red horse from hell's belly and straight into the streets. Some said he arrived as a messenger of the gods, a stark reminder of the brutality of public mutilation, some said he was a wizard using trickery to escape his own rightful execution. One pamphlet included an illustration: a knight in armor dark as storm clouds, rescued maiden in his arms, flying from the chopping block with hoofbeats of thunder. Ganondorf had thought it amusing. Haema had halted the publication of the paper and ordered the printing presses responsible to be destroyed. There were more than a few fires in the publishing district following the failed execution, but Ganondorf was responsible for none. It was an admission of weakness to him, to shut down the presses and disallow publications, but Haema was a man for whom honor and dignity were the highest priorities, and he could not have so embarrassing a debacle published too widely.

He had put out a reward for Link and Epona, and he had already been brought more than a dozen young men and a dozen more large, oddly-colored horses, but none of them had been the right ones. The search was useless and the stories abounded, but Ganondorf knew the citizenry would soon forget about it anyway. Those that were not there would disbelieve the accounts, and those there would misremember. Something scandalous or marvelous would happen soon enough and in a month there would be no talk of the demon flying away from his cloud of hell-smoke. Even the stablemen would eventually calm down, though it seemed it would take a while; once they learned their old comrade was the one who caused such an uproar, there was little else for them to speak of. The King had heard that all of Viscen's spare hours had gone to assuaging his old friend Talon about the boy—apparently the stableman had returned time and time again to demand answers no one had the authority to give him. But even the stables would calm down eventually. It was the nature of exciting news to get old fast.

But there was still the problem that the whole debacle had left him short a warhorse. Gorman was procuring him another, and he could only hope that whatever steed was brought to him from the green fields around Lonlon could be half as intelligent, strong and responsive as Epona. But most of her value was in her training, and the stables would never again have a worker who could match Link in that skill (it was such a pity he had been so good at his work; if he had been more dispensable Ganondorf might've just killed him in the desert and forgotten about him). But as it was, the King would have to settle for the second-best warhorse in the country. At least until he found Epona again.

But if the King was anything, he was patient. He could wait until he found his horse and her recalcitrant rider, he could wait to muster his troops again, wait until Daroen entreated his father for peace for the thousandth time, wait until his generals and ambassadors in the desert could muster what remained of the Gerudo army and send it marching his way, wait until his soldiers were rested and fed and ready to return to the ranks with renewed vigor.

Ganondorf prided himself on being impeccable in his timing. It was what had won him the desert, it was what had wrested the crown from his mother's head before she could lose Eldin once more, and it was what would allow him to take the South, and to succeed where Elgra had failed. When Ordona and Eldin were his, when all corners of Hyrule's map were charted and owned, when every citizen of the land lived in peace and unity, there would be no soldiers to muster, no warhorses to covet, no need for impeccable timing. But until then, he would do what was necessary, when it was necessary. He was quite good at that.


	64. Healing

"We as mortal beings are defined primarily by the magnitude of our failures. If we cannot accept this, we cannot accept our own existence."

Sage Sahasrahla

* * *

Link had always been good at groveling. In fact, until that fateful day when Impa had burst into his quiet life, he'd prided himself on that talent. But when he sat next to her now, bowing his head again and again over her unconscious body, apologizing, begging—he could not help but feel out of practice. When he would reach out to touch her pallid hands, when he would walk her through an account of everything he'd done wrong, everything he had confessed to the elder, everything that had led to her sorry state, he wished, fervently, that the sheer intensity of his apologies was enough to pull her from her sleep, if only for the sake of reprimanding him.

"Do you think Impa would tolerate you speaking like that?"

He turned his head to see the elder had crept up on him—in her old age, when many women creaked as they walked, wheezed as they shuffled, she still retained that Sheikah stealth. And as always, she wore her impenetrable smile, her mask of contentedness that betrayed no worry over Impa's state. He wished he could show so little.

"No," he admitted.

"Then stop." The elder tottered beside him, grasping the edges of her robe and lowering herself to the floor. "It is not difficult to close one's mouth when needed."

"But it's my fault, Elder…"

"Hush. You have already told me. And I've already told you: you have done your best. You have kept her alive when she alone could not—that in itself is a triumph. You both have escaped captivity and survived your own execution. You freed the princess from the city and sent her safely to our village. You have completed your assignment, perhaps with more difficulty than anticipated, but you have done well nonetheless. You deserve to enjoy the fruits of your labor."

Link just pursed his lips and stared down at Impa's sunken face. She was breathing more easily now, and she no longer smelled as if death itself were crawling from her wound, but he was less than pleased with how weak she still looked. Though he'd only been awake for a day and had never left her side, he couldn't hide his worry that she was not recovering faster.

"The sun rose hours ago," the elder told him. She rested a bony hand on his shoulder. "You've been sulking here all night, and staring at her will not make her recover faster. Go, greet the others at Irma's house."

He sighed and gave in. He didn't like the thought of leaving Impa's side only to have her succumb to the infection in his absence, but he had to admit there was little he could do. He knew he should make his way down to the house, to greet the others and thank them, to ask forgiveness for his incompetence. Perhaps that's why he stayed here, hiding at Impa's side for so many hours; to avoid the necessary confessions and admissions of his defeat at the hands of the endless Eldine mountains. But Merel was right, as always.

"Will you send word if she wakes up?" he asked her. The old woman nodded, kneeling onto the small pillow by Impa's shoulder and soaking a rag in the basin beside the mat. When the elder leaned over her, draping the cloth over her face and hiding her from view, Link could force himself to hobble to the doorway, glancing only once behind him before he stepped out.

At the mouth of the cave, Link found two figures, black against the morning light, one tall and broad, with a mess of disarranged hair, the other with the curvy shape and unmistakable bun of Talm. Link hobbled up to them, stopping before them to look at his feet, unsure of what he could say.

"Palo, Talm…" he started, searching for words. "I…"

Something abruptly met his left eye with surprising force, and he reeled back, stumbling on his shaking legs. Palo retracted his fist, and Link lifted a hand to his stinging brow, blinking painfully. Talm quickly put herself between him and Palo, gripping the latter's wrist and holding him in place.

"Don't, Palo—"

"You stupid bastard," he growled, "you put grass clippings in her wound and expect that to heal her? You could've at least _tried_ not to kill her." It was the first time he'd seen Palo since they'd parted at Roan, and the first time he'd ever seen the man so angry (or, come to think of it, angry at all). But Link just clenched his jaw, lowering his good hand and preparing for Palo's next strike. He knew it was the least he deserved.

But Talm stood her ground, shoving Palo with enough force to send him stumbling backwards, toward the light of the cave's mouth. "Don't be a child. Just because you feel like shit doesn't mean you get to take it out on him." Palo stilled, hands falling back to his side as Talm continued. "How badly do you think I feel, Palo? Do you remember the last words I said to her before we parted?" To Link, it seemed so long ago, so far in the past that the seed of tacit mutual forgiveness could've easily sprung between them. He had barely even remembered that argument—but it still seemed fresh enough in Talm's mind. "If she dies, what are her last memories of me? Shouting and bickering with her—but you don't see me taking my regret out on others."

Palo breathed deeply through gritted teeth. He closed his eyes, and his brows softened over his red tattoos, the ire faded from his face. "I'm sorry." He spat the words out as one might spit distasteful food, before wheeling around them, past Talm and past the elder's quiet fire pit. He did not look back at either of them before he disappeared into the shadows of her cave.

"Don't mind him," Talm said, taking Link's good arm in hers. "He's just worried."

"I've… never seen him worried before," Link said, limping with Talm's guidance to the mouth of the cave. Even in the face of battle, even staring down the sandworm that thrust its way through the gates of Obra Garud, the deadseer hadn't betrayed a hint of anxiety.

"He never worries about anything but my sister," Talm said. "And even then, only when it's convenient for him." Link thought of the visions he'd had under Barudi's needle of Impa lying in Palo's arms, face pressed to his neck, and pangs of something a little more inimical than guilt ran through him. His stomach fluttered, as if he were falling, but Talm gripped him tightly, easing him down the slope toward the village below. Link squinted against the morning's bright blue light, and could make out the shape of Irma's house, smoke rising steadily from its stack. The air was sharp, the sky clear, and the chilly winds of spring still rustled the trees around them, and he suddenly had to stop, bite his tongue and hold back the moisture welling in his eyes. He did not know if it was because of the sudden, nostalgic smell of pine and smoke that drove him to tears, the dull ache in his hand, the sting of his newest bruise, the sheer relief of seeing Kakariko again, or the thought of Impa lying in the elder's back room, Palo leaning protectively over her.

"Are you all right?" Talm asked, as he struggled to regain his composure. He nodded, and she held him up as he slowed his breathing, wiped one eye and let her gently lead him onward.

When they knocked on Irma's door, it opened wide for them—and in a flash of warm, sweet-smelling air, Link was brought back to the first day he had set foot under this welcoming roof, two autumns ago, voiceless and ignorant and frightened. As Irma pulled him and her daughter inside, all wide smile and generosity, he couldn't stop himself from falling into her arms with sheer gratitude. She held him upright, as he took in the smell of the house, the wonderful warmth of it; the sight of the fire roaring in the hearth, Talporom lingering before it, reading an open scroll; the sounds of Gwen and her family in the kitchen, the feeling of Talm's hand gentle on his back and Irma's lips on his skin as she pecked him gracefully on the forehead.

This time he could not stop himself. It seemed like everything he's silenced inside him for the past months rose to the surface, he felt every shield he'd erected during his trials crack open. He fell against Irma and sobbed into her dress, letting all the anguish pour from him into her infinitely patient embrace. And she, merciful as ever, held his head against her shoulder and let him cry onto the silk of her sleeve, muttering words of encouragement into his ear. When he lifted his head, taking a deep breath, she had a handkerchief ready for him, which she had somehow pulled from some fold in her dress while he was busy embarrassing himself on her shoulder. She really was a miraculous woman.

She dabbed at his rapidly swelling eye, red and inflamed with something more than tears. She touched it lightly, examining what he assumed must've been the first markings of a bruise on his brow. "What happened here?" she asked.

"I bumped into the doorway," he answered, before Talm could. "I… It was the herbs Talporom's been feeding me."

Talm gave him a look of acquiescence, while Irma just stroked back his hair from his newest injury, shaking her head.

Talporom lowered the scroll he was perusing and glanced at them. "Would you like me to give you a lower dose?" he asked.

"I'm… fine," Link answered.

"You're not fine, you're too thin and you're not nearly strong enough to be walking about," Irma said. "Go sit by Talporom, warm yourself up."

She was right, of course, and even if Link had wanted to disobey her, her sturdy smile and his own exhausted legs wouldn't let him. When he seated himself on the skins by the fire, he noticed Talporom move from him, just a little, turning his scroll away from his sight as if he were afraid Link would lean over to read it. But he didn't have the particular desire to read right now—he just wiped a few remaining tears from his face and tried to find a position where he could rest his bandaged right arm comfortably.

"How is it?" Talporom asked, nodding to his injury.

"Not… great."

"Yes, well, it will have to remain 'not great' for a few weeks to come. Then we can take off the splints and see how you're doing." The man shook his head. "It was quite an impressive mess. I was curious if a machine did it."

"No," Link answered. "Just the King."

"With what?"

"His hand."

Talporom narrowed his eyes at Link in speculative doubt for a second, but then resumed scrutinizing the scroll in front of him. "I suppose hearing that shouldn't surprise me. We both know the exact nature of the power that man wields."

Link blinked; there was something conspiratorial in Talporom's words, in the way he lowered his eyes back to the browned parchment. He was about to reach over and tap him with his good hand, interrupt his reading and ask him to continue, but the scurrying of tiny feet brought his attention to the floor beside him.

Zelda, bigger than he'd remembered, with a thicker head of hair, came barreling toward him, in that joyfully unbalanced, careening way only toddlers can. Her face was plump, round, her feet stomping along the wood of Irma's floor under her little white nightdress. She stretched out her arms and slammed into him, just in time for him to lift his injured hand from her way. She collapsed on the skins with an energetic laugh, and he let her squirm about his leg, reaching down to muss her hair when she stilled.

 _Oh gods,_ he said to himself, as she rolled onto her back and gurgled at him. _How can she grow so much in so little time?_

"Forgive her." Gwen's voice rang out as she stepped toward him, arms reaching out for her daughter. "She's learned to run." When she bent down beside Link, grasping for the child, her eyes lingered on him for a moment, on his sunken eyes and grayish skin, his too-thin body and his lump of a hand in his thick bandage. "I…" she started, pulling Zelda to her, but from her open mouth suddenly rang her husband's voice. It filled the room with a loud, flat drone, and Shaddon appeared next to his wife.

"You made it," he said.

Link glanced up at the man's poorly-shaven chin, his long nose and the thick glasses sitting across the bridge, and suddenly felt guilty he had assumed for so long this man had betrayed them. "I did."

"Looks like you met some trouble on the road," he said.

Link didn't answer. He wasn't sure how much of his ordeal the others might have divulged to Shaddon or his wife, but he decided silence was probably the most appropriate answer to such an observation. He just nodded, eyes wandering back to Zelda, who now squirmed in her mother's arms, insisting over and over, "No."

"So, what happened, exactly?"

"Dear," Gwen started, "I'm not sure now is the time to interrogate him." She pulled herself from the floor and handed their daughter to him, nearly shooing him away from the fire and back into the kitchen. Talporom shook his head, not lifting his eyes from his scroll. He muttered something in what was probably Old Sheikah, and by the tone in his voice Link knew it had been something derisive.

* * *

Link had grown so used to solitude in his captivity that it almost frightened him how crowded Irma's house had become. The woman herself strutted through the rooms and yard like a ruler surveying her kingdom—she took special care to bestow benevolence on Link, fussing over his injuries and appearing nearly every hour with food in hand, bidding him eat, eat, always eat, he couldn't regain his strength if he starved himself, could he? Zelda was hardly better—she sped about the house, perpetually out of arm's reach of her parents, demanding him to play with her or pick her up, babbling at him in infantile nonsense ("That girl's always flapping about like a rabid keese," he heard Talporom mutter to himself more than once). Talm often saved Link from the brunt of Zelda's energy; though he would've loved to lift the child and swing her around, to chase her as she demanded, his bandaged hand and weak legs—not to mention Irma's aggressive doting—kept him tragically idle. And Talporom would sit patiently in the midst of it, reading in complete tranquility while Zelda screamed and Talm chased her, Gwen and Irma chattered and Shaddon sat loudly asking if they could possibly get a paper delivered to Kakariko—he would die, simply _die_ if he had to go another week without knowing what went on in the Capital. When the mayhem proved too much for Link, he could slip out to the back and call for Epona—though she had free rein of the village, she would always answer his call, invariably leading a few Sheikah children in her wake, who were both bewildered and impressed with her obedience to him. But Irma would inevitably find him wandering and drag him back into the house, where she would promptly attempt to shove too much food down his throat.

It was the better part of two days before Link managed to escape. With Irma and Talm in the kitchen, Zelda pulling at both of her parents' arms to play and Talporom neck-deep in old tomes, he slipped out the front door and limped his way to the elder's cave without interruption.

He passed the old woman on the way in, and she told him about Impa's progress. Merel said she fluctuated nearly by the hour, that some were worse, some were better, some held no change at all. Sometimes she accepted water, sometimes she didn't, sometimes she moaned in her sleep, sometimes she was so silent the elder feared she would pass into death. Now, she lay alone in the medicine room, soundless but stable, so Link made his way through the soft torchlight into the deepest regions of the cavern.

He had not seen Palo since their less than friendly reunion, but he hoped his black eye would heal before Impa woke up—he knew she could easily guess who had put it there. She would have a few choice words for the both of them, if the swelling and coloration didn't manage to fade before then.

He had brought up what had been left over from dinner, just in case she awoke hungry. But after a few hours of sitting at her side in silence, he raised a cold potato to his own mouth, biting into its soft body. Though his appetite had faded looking at Impa's heart-wrenching state, he ate anyway, mostly for Irma's sake and her insistence he keep up his strength.

He was about to reach for another potato when a sound behind him drew his eyes from Impa's impassive, pale face. It was not the telltale shuffle of the elder's tiny feet, nor the broad footsteps of Talporom come to check up on his daughter. Gwen emerged from the shadows of the hall and lingered, thin, pale and nervous, in the doorway. A white knuckle rapped lightly on the stone, and she bit her lip, looking around the room as if for a potential threat.

"The elder said I was allowed to come in," she said. "I didn't know. I thought this place might be… sacred. Or something."

"It probably is," Link admitted. "But that doesn't mean you can't come in." _You're the mother of the rightful queen,_ he stopped himself from saying. _You can go where you want._

Gwen approached cautiously, bunching her silk dress in her hands as she knelt beside him. Her grey-blue eyes wandered over Impa's thin, blanketed body, settling on her sunken face. Link could see Gwen's chest rise and fall, as if struggling a little to breathe.

"I…" she started, folding her hands in her lap. She bit her lip, disentangled her fingers and tried again. "In truth… I don't know what to say to you. To either of you. You… you destroyed my life." Link lowered his eyes back to Impa, watching her forehead wrinkle slightly in fitful sleep. He could not argue with her. "You threatened to kidnap my daughter, you drove us from our house, you ruined my husband's career." He supposed an apology wouldn't suffice, so he sat there, potato still half-chewed in his mouth, while she continued. "But… it's probably the best thing that's happened to me." At this, Link lifted his eyes. She had turned from him, cheeks flushed, hands buried again in her lap. "I hated that place. I hated the city. I hated the noise, the smoke, I hated the smells… but I didn't even realize it, not until I came here. Here… here I can breathe. The air is clear, and I have room to just… take a breath." As if to give him an example, she inhaled slowly, closing her eyes and smiling. "And Irma has been so kind. She's been like a second mother to my child."

Link could not help but take advantage of her pause. "And to me."

"She is so good to us, even with Shaddon's complaining. And I don't have to do what he tells me so much anymore. He'll go on about whatever he does—about what friends said what, who bought what portion of what company, who struck a deal, how much money is in this and that investment—but I don't have to listen. Irma will invite me to the kitchen or henhouse when she sees I'm bored, and poor Talporom will have to sit and listen to him." She covered her mouth to chuckle. "But he will get used to it all, I think. I didn't know how he'd take the news that Zelda was…"

"You told him he wasn't her father?" Link asked.

"Oh, Hylia's love, of course not. I told him _I'm_ the illegitimate one. My real father was of royal blood. He's a little shocked at the whole thing but… he's says he's proud to be the husband of a queen and the father of a princess. And Zelda… I can tell she loves it here. She's just so alive, so full of energy. She likes all the Sheikah children, she likes Irma and Talporom, she adores you. She always nudges me to take her to see that horse of yours. She always has something to do, somewhere to explore, especially outside."

Link grinned, imagining the little girl teetering after the other Sheikah children, mud-covered and filled with life. "It's not like the city, is it?"

"Not at all. Are you from here, Link?"

"I'm from the Capital."

"Oh? What district? What school did you go to? What family are you from?" He just lifted his good hand and tugged at the collar of his shirt, revealing his mark. Gwen's face fell. "Oh. I'm sorry."

He lowered his gaze back to Impa. "Don't be. The Crown treated me well." He grit his teeth, anger spreading from his stomach outward. Something itched the back of his hand, but he couldn't scratch it. "Probably better than it should've." He supposed both he and Ganondorf had paid the price for it—he for overtiring the King's mercy, and the King for offering it too liberally in the first place.

Gwen reached out to touch his arm, scooting closer. Her hand fell gently near his elbow, where the bandages ended and his loose shirt began. Her touch was soft, comforting. "You know, I just wanted to raise my daughter in peace. I wanted to forget she was Daph's, to hide any evidence of her being… well… royalty. Then you came and shattered everything. My life wasn't perfect, but it was all I had. I was ready to hate you for what you did to us." Her finger ran along the soft wrinkle in the crook of his elbow, and a chill shuddered up to his shoulder. "Shaddon still does. Though he tries to hide it. But I think… I think I knew in my heart something like this would happen. I should've been prepared for it the moment I let Daph into my life, though… I had no idea…" Her eyes wandered to Impa's sleeping face. "I don't know what happened to either of you… but I'm sorry it did. I hope she wakes up, I really do. I need to tell her how much her medicine has helped me." She leaned closer to him, and right when he suspected she might kiss him on his reddening cheek, she stood. "So do let me know when she wakes up, will you?"

Link watched her go, watched the elegant swish of her dress, the way her long black hair swayed down her back. As she strode through the doorway, she twisted, making room for the figure that slinked past her without a word. She looked over her shoulder once, smiling warmly, before disappearing into the shadows beyond the tunnel, leaving Link alone with the man that had passed her on her way out.

Palo stared at him for a moment, lingering on his black eye, before stepping toward him, a fragrant basket in hand. "Irma made sweet cakes," he said. "She told me to give you one."

Palo dropped the basket on the floor before seating himself, crossing his legs and pulling back the small cloth that covered the contents. Sweet-smelling steam rolled up into Link's nostrils, and he decided to forgo the potatoes.

"That's… more than one," he said.

"One for you, six for me." Palo reached into the sack at his waist and brought out his pipe and a pinch of his strong-smelling firegrass, loading and lighting as Link reached for a sweet cake. He took a generous breath and blew the smoke from his nose before offering the pipe. Link supposed it was as good a gesture of forgiveness he was going to get, so he took it between his fingers, though he inhaled shallowly, buffering the smoke with plenty of air.

"A black eye doesn't look half bad on you," Palo said.

Link's laugh turned into a cough. He covered his mouth and handed the pipe back to Palo, who took another easy breath of smoke.

"You did pretty well," Palo told him. His voice had taken on a sad, almost shrunken tone, but Link was not quite sure if it was just the smoke affecting his timbre. "Ditching your own execution on the back of the King's warhorse. Pretty bold."

"I… guess it was. Though, I had help." He looked up at Palo. "Someone threw a smoke bomb. Or else it was the gods sending a cloud down to cover me."

"Must've been the gods," Palo smiled. "They're prone to doing heroic things like that. But not quite as heroic as carrying someone across the mountains with one hand and no food. It was stupid, I mean _really_ stupid, but… gloriously so. I'm not sure if I would've been able to get as far as you did. Then again, I probably would've found a smarter route."

Link lowered his head. "Palo… I couldn't find my way back. I got to the base of Eldin and then from there I… I couldn't."

The implication was not lost on him. He sat in silence for a minute, smoking thoughtfully. "You've never entered the village without a blindfold, have you?"

Link thought back on it. He'd arrived on Impa's back, soundless and sightless, and he'd left in such a hurry the forest had been nothing but a green blur around him. "No."

"That seems a decent excuse to me," Palo said. "More?"

When he offered Link the pipe again, he turned it down. He finished his sweet cake, staring at his feet for a moment, mulling over Palo's words in his head. He supposed the man had a point, but knowing that would've been little comfort when he was wandering, starving and afraid, with the village just out of reach. Still, he appreciated the sentiment more than he would've expected.

The warmth of the firegrass forced a yawn from him. He reached for another cake, and Palo let him pick the softest one from the top of the steaming bunch. Link wavered a little as he chewed, comfortable darkness closing in from the corners of his vision.

Palo lay a hand on the back of his head, mussing his too-long hair a little. "Regardless, you took care of her when she needed you. There are… very few moments when Impa is reliant on others. And you didn't fail her."

"I… I guess I didn't. Not entirely."

"'Not entirely' is usually the best one can do. I know I can't exactly imagine what you've been through, but at least you were by her side. I wasn't."

"You weren't assigned to be by her side," Link replied.

"Aye, that's true. But I tried anyway. Unfortunately, I wasn't as fast as you."

Link lowered his head. "I do wish… I wish you'd caught up sooner. Then we might not have…"

"What happened, happened. And even as things are, I think Impa would be proud of you."

Link swallowed, wondering for half a moment if the elder had put Palo up to this, but when he looked at the Sheikah's red eyes, his calm stare, he could tell the deadseer meant it. Link was not quite trained enough to detect the most expertly crafted Sheikah lies, but Palo left himself open like a book, purposefully easy to read. Link just leaned back, enjoying the sweetness on his tongue for a little bit before his eyes closed of their own accord. He slumped toward Palo, and he felt the man's hand on his shoulder, helping him to the ground beside Impa's mat.

"Go to sleep, kid. I'll finish that bun for you." Palo's voice seemed a distant echo. The uneaten portion of Link's sweet cake was removed from his hand, and he sank to the floor, resting his bad arm across his stomach. He took a deep breath, letting the smoke flow over him, and closed his eyes—

He heard a soft whimper of pain. He rolled his head, coaxing consciousness back into it, wondering if it had been his own. But the sound soared high above him, escalating into a cry of surprise, then of terror, and he bolted upright.

He looked around him. It appeared that hours had passed. The dying torchlight dimly flickered in the room's shadowy corner, and the smell of firegrass lightly permeated the air. To one side, Palo snored, hands folded behind his head, and to the other, Impa squirmed in half-sleep, hoarse voice scraping up her throat and echoing along the walls of the chamber in pain. Link shook Palo violently, coaxing him with more than a few groans of protest from his deep, smoke-enveloped sleep.

"Palo, get up," Link said, gripping the man's shoulder and wrestling him from the ground. It took Palo a few seconds to open his eyes, to realize where he was, but as soon as he did, he bolted to his feet.

"You stay with her," he commanded, "I'll get Merel." He ran from the room into the shadows of the rocky hallway, and Link turned his attention to Impa.

In the dim light of the torch, he saw the sweat on her face, the writhing of her body, each wrinkle in her forehead and every strained muscle in her neck. She cried out, twisting, muttering incoherently. Link grabbed the nearest cloth and wiped her sweat from her forehead, calling her name, telling her that he was here, beside her. She clenched her teeth, shaking, and let out one last noise of what he could only guess was terror, before she stilled, took a shallow breath, and opened her eyes.

They were yellowish, watery, and wide with panic. Impa's mouth hung open as she scanned the room, moving from the torch to the rocky ceiling, from the cracked walls to the shelves of medicine concealed in shadow. He could see she saw the same thing he did when he first awoke—the darkness of a dungeon, the low ceiling of a cell, the musky stone of Grog's ballroom.

When her eyes met Link's, she closed them again, released a wheeze of relief, and tried to push herself onto her elbows. Link helped her as best he could, letting her place a hand on his shoulder and pull herself almost to a sitting position before she had to fall again, exhausted, back onto her pillow.

"Link," she whispered. "Did we…"

"We made it," he told her. He took her hand in his and squeezed. "Zelda, too. We're all okay."

A weak smile glowed on her thin face. She reached up and clutched his elbow, sighing. He wiped another bead of sweat that dripped down her forehead. "I dreamt… I…"

Palo burst in with the elder (one much faster and more violently than the other), and slid to her side, nearly bowling Link over. He gripped Impa's shoulders and lifted her into his arms, cradling her head and waist. She just let him squeeze her, unwilling to (or perhaps too weak to) wrestle herself from his grasp. When he let her go, crooked smile on his face, she slumped and sighed, holding onto his shoulder for balance.

"How long was I…"

"Seven years," he answered seriously, to which she let out a weak, raspy laugh.

"You've slept long enough," the elder said. Instead of jumping in Impa's direction as Palo had, she now busied herself with reigniting the torches on the wall with a wave of her wizened hands. The flames licked to the ceiling, filling the room with light and warmth. "We've been waiting for you to wake, Impa," Merel said. "How are you feeling?"

"Sore," she whispered. "Tired. Sick." She glanced down at her bandaged chest, and reached a hand to pull at the dressings until the elder commanded her to leave it alone. Her hand fell back to her side and she readjusted herself in Palo's arms, wheezing with the effort. She examined them both, eyes wandering over Palo's crooked smile, over Link's bandaged hand and his bruised eye. She lifted a finger and rested it on Link's cheek, curious frown passing over her face. She looked back at Palo with a frown. "Palo, did you hit him?"

"No," they both said, too quickly.


	65. The Ideal Deaths of Link and Impa

"Had I once been privy to the machinations of young love, I would teach you all about it. However, I have never been young."

Obaru of the Haunted Waste

* * *

Even in early summer (or late spring—the seasons turned capriciously in Eldin, with only as much regularity as they could spare to be called "seasons" at all), the night was cold enough to warrant a trip up to the hot spring. Link had waited until well after sunset before he grabbed his lamp and made his way up the rocky hillside to the steaming pool. With Talporom and Irma in their room, Shaddon and his family in Talm's, and with Talm herself having passed out in front of the fire with a book of poetry still open on her stomach, he knew he would not be disturbed or questioned as he limped his way out the door and up the hill to the springs. A change of clothes draped over his good arm, he watched his feet carefully as he strode past the village center, past the graveyard (it seemed one of those rare, quiet nights when even Palo might've slept soundly), and up the slope to the springs.

When he reached the water, he slipped off his shoes and lowered the tip of one toe into the rippling pool. He sucked in the steam, the wonderful, almost sulfurous smell of minerals, and lowered himself at the water's edge. He stripped and slid inside, letting the warmth seep deep into his bones and relax his muscles. He sank up to his chest, but kept his bandaged hand well away from the water. He sighed, leaning back on the rocks, and lifted his eyes to the sky above him. Infinitely past his reach, the stars twinkled in the flawless Eldine night, like white lights shining through clear water. It struck him as odd that this was the same sky that had followed him across the country, from Kakariko to Riverton, from the Gerudo desert to the Hill Provinces, from the Capital back to here.

He expected it to feel more like a homecoming. Every night in the freezing Capital, too often in the dungeons of the palace, he had dreamed of this moment, when he could slide back into the springs and breathe the steam of relief. But he could not shake the eerie sense that Kakariko was only a short stop on a long road, a deep breath taken before a plunge. Though the King had reclaimed his homeland and returned to his seat of power, his work was not done. And neither, then, was Link's. The scion of the old royal family was safe and healthy, isolated from danger and surrounded by wise, caring protectors, but a peculiar nervousness still set his heart thumping.

 _It can't stay this way forever_ , he thought, lowering one hand into the spring and splashing hot water onto his face. _Elder Merel wouldn't just intend for Zelda to live her life out here in the wilderness. The little girl will get bigger. She'll learn about herself and her station, and then…_ He stopped himself before he could continue down that discouraging path of thought. After all, there wasn't necessarily a hurry, was there? Zelda could grow up here in safety while he and the others took care of the dangerous but necessary Sheikah work. She could marry, and have a son or daughter who would inherit her birthright, who would in turn produce children… Each member of the royal line could grow up here in Kakariko, learning the arts of the Sheikah in peace, for hundreds of years into the future, until it came time for the descendent of one royal line to contest the throne of the other. He supposed that was the best possible outcome for the little girl. Otherwise…

A shuffling in the bushes behind him pricked up his ears. He turned, reaching a steaming arm out to grasp the lamp. He squinted against the darkness, and when he saw who it was, he lowered it again. He sank back into the water, realizing with no small surprise that this was exactly who he had expected, exactly who he'd hoped for. He had just not known it until that moment.

"You should be resting," he told Impa.

"I've rested enough," she said, limping to the side of the pool and kicking off her shoes. She bent down and removed her loose shirt, her trousers, but left the length of bandage across her chest. She sighed when she slipped her feet into the water, and Link averted his gaze as she lowered herself beside him. "I knew I'd find you here."

"Me too," Link answered, truthfully. He was not sure why else he would've waited until the rest of the town was asleep to wash himself. It would've been easier to have someone help him with his clothes and lamp, to help him ease his injured body into the water. But he had waited until he would meet with no disturbance, and he knew, in the spark of a star-bright realization, that it was for her.

"Elder Merel won't let me alone," Impa said. She adjusted her bandages, keeping them well above the water. "She fell asleep only a few minutes ago—good thing she's old and tired, or I would've never been able to slip past her."

Link chuckled. He looked up at her, at the thinness of her arms, the pallid skin that should've been a rich brown, the overgrown hair that she would've cropped ages ago if she had the chance. He himself had only just received a haircut, courtesy of Irma and Talm, and as he watched the strands blow away in the wind, he could only pretend they were thousands of tiny golden threads, taking the memories of his imprisonment with them as they flew into the green distance.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each staring at the sky, but Link found himself unable to relax completely. He was inordinately aware of her sitting beside him; he could almost feel her through the air and water. When she spoke, he sighed with relief.

"We're some team, aren't we?" she said. "Always one carrying the other on their back."

"And Epona, too," he replied. "She brought us all the way to Eldin."

"I… I don't really remember much. I wasn't in my best form."

His smile faded when she lowered her eyes. "Impa… I…" He had to stop there.

"I don't know what to say, either," she admitted. She closed her eyes for a moment before lifting them to the sky. "Maybe I shouldn't say anything at all, and just let what happened rest in silence. But… gods, I can't believe I'm here." Her eyes traced the silver asterisms above her, pulsating against the blue void. "I didn't think I'd see the sky again. Down there, in the dark, where they wouldn't let me see you… I told myself I was prepared to die. Every Sheikah is prepared to die for her cause. That's what makes us Sheikah. But I…" She paused, lifting her hands to cover her eyes. Link could see the edges of her mouth wrinkle in what may have been horror. "I wasn't prepared. Gods, Link, I was scared. I didn't know if you were alive, I didn't know if Zelda had made it… It wasn't dying that scared me. It was dying without knowing if anything I did mattered in the end."

When she lowered her hand, he saw tears. For a moment he thought the world was falling apart around him—Impa, crying, sitting here before him as vulnerable as he was. He said her name, but his voice came out hoarse, rough, a contradiction against the soft backdrop of water and steam.

"Down in that dark room, I knew it would end too soon, and I regretted it, I regretted not telling you… I wished I could've gone back and told you…" She stopped there, voice lingering on the breeze for a second before being carried away into the trees. She turned to him, and he lifted his eyes to her, taking in her gaunt features, her red eyes, the way her tears shone on the dark tattoo that made its way from her eyelid down her cheek.

And she leaned toward him, lips parting, eyelashes fluttering closed. She placed a hand on his shoulder and he felt her fingers gently squeeze him as her lips pressed against his mouth. When her skin met his, a sudden, unbearable pain shot through him like the jolt of a burn, emanating from the scars of Barudi's needle to the furthest parts of his body. The stinging on his lips did not relent when he pulled away, letting out a cry of surprise.

Impa retreated from him. Her hand slid from his shoulder, falling limply into the water, and she stared at him for a bewildered, devastated moment before she stood. The shadows across her face deepened in pain as she grit her teeth and lifted herself from the water. "I'm sorry," she whispered, and made to get out, steam dissipating from her arms into the cold air.

Link sat for a fraction of a moment, petrified, before he reached out and gripped her wrist. She paused, looking over her naked shoulder at him, eyes still wet and red, brow still furrowed. He pulled her back down, and she yielded easily—she slipped back into the water beside him, enveloped in steam and the blue-silver glow of the stars.

He stared at her, at the way her tired eyes shone with hope, the way her mouth opened slightly, at the curve of her cheekbone and the red tattoo along it. He lifted a hand and placed it on the side of her head, stroking back her damp hair, and his heart struggled inside him, thumping away in his throat. Images passed through his mind, transparent, transient—of her lying with her back to him, warming him up on the way up Eldin's steep slopes, of the way he had fallen against her shoulder when they slept next to one another under the cold desert sky, her fingers wrapping around his, stroking back his hair in their dingy apartment in the Capital, her weight on his back, her scent of green trees and rivers, her unyielding spirit as he dragged her across mountains and mountains…

And when he was ready, when he was sure he had banished the pain of Barudi's marks on him, when he was sure his lips would not sting in protest to the touch, he kissed her. He brushed his lips against hers, lightly, and her breath hovered before him, mingling with his. It was a kiss devoid of that sort of passion that opened mouths against one another, that forced tongues to intertwine, but it was rife with a deep, serene sort of knowledge, like the spoken words of a confession. She was gentle, her movements unhurried. Her mouth pressed over his lower lip and moved softly against it; he could barely feel the glance of a tongue on his skin. Her hand reached up and cupped his cheek, and she ran her fingers back, along his torn ear, into his hair, down his neck. He felt his good hand wander to her watery waist, his bad one lay itself gently across her shoulder, bandage to bandage. He let out a sigh against her, letting the terror of his past and the anxiety of his present drift away in his breath, mixing with the steam around them to be carried off by the chilly wind.

When he and Impa released one another, when they parted in the water, he could not stop the cautious smile that spread from his heart to his face. Impa leaned in to lay her lips against his chin, kissing along his jawline until she arrived at his ear, and rested her head on his shoulder. He heard a sigh from her, something that was not quite laughter and not quite a cry. His lips still tingled from her touch; they didn't sting, they didn't burn, even though the skin above them drew tight as his grin widened.

They slept under one skin that night, reveling in one another's survival, exploring one another's scars with hands and lips and eyes. He rested his fingers on every cut, on every contusion of her battered body, and her hands lingered on his; passionlessly, painlessly. He let her rest her head against his collarbone, running her hands down the raised marks in his back, where the whip had left stripes of ill-healed tissue. And she let him trace hers—the same scars, the same bruises. He did not let himself imagine her ordeals, he didn't let himself picture Impa under the whip, under the fire of the interrogation chamber—he just marveled at her strength, took in the miracle of her survival. He lay his cheek against hers, brushing his eyelashes against her skin. She put her hands on his shoulder blades and pulled him close, locking the crook of her knee in his. Entwined motionlessly, they slept, hands on scars and lips on cheeks, hair splayed, limbs still as stone. High above them, far beyond the roof of Irma's warm house and the shuddering trees around it, the stars ushered in the first breezes of summer.

* * *

When Link woke, Impa's head against his shoulder, he almost couldn't believe it. He had to remind himself over and over that he was here, safe and free in Kakariko, and not hallucinating, starving in the wild, or dreaming under some spell of Barudi's. It took him a few minutes of grounding himself in the present before he could blink easily, let his eyes close without fearing that if he opened them again, he would find himself in the King's dungeon, trapped under those freezing walls, or worse, trapped under the gaze of the rova. But he could feel the soft skins beneath him, and the strong wood beneath that, he could feel Impa's hair tickle his shoulder, he could see the light of morning pour through Irma's window and he could smell pines and ferns and rivers beyond the glass.

He sighed. He took a deep breath of that fresh Kakariko air, chilly with the scent of early morning, and let himself relax. His breath came easier as wakefulness crept on him, his heart ceased its rush, and he lay his head back down, staring at the ceiling for a few minutes in silence. He listened to Impa's breath, listened to the creak of the old house in the wind, until a shudder from her body drove him to readjust himself. She still had one hand around his waist, one tucked under herself, but her fingers had started to clench, digging into his ribs as if she expected some unseen force to pull her from him. Her brow knit in somnolent alarm, and she started breathing heavily against his chest, muttering. When her grip tightened so much he gasped in pain, he reached over with his bandaged hand and prodded her gently, repeating her name.

It took a few painful seconds to free her from her soporific panic. When she lifted her head from his chest, she sat perfectly, alarmingly still for a moment. Her eyes were wide, red veins creeping along them with such thickness it seemed her irises may have started leaking. She only began to breathe once more when he lay a hand against her bare back, brushing his skin along the raised scar tissue of her marks. When she looked at him, it was with disbelief. He knew the feeling.

"You're all right," he told her. "You're alive."

She lay herself back against him, the last quiver of her sleeping struggle dissipating with her sigh. She closed her eyes, and he could see something return to her that was more than mere wakefulness. "I am, aren't I?" She laughed mirthlessly, breath soft against his chest. "Gods, I was back there… I swear I was back in my prison for a minute." He kissed the top of her head to remind her she was not, and she would never be, but she stared blankly, unmoved by his touch. "Someone had come into my cell with a knife. And I heard the dogs, I hear the barking and howling of hounds…" Link's blood ran suddenly cold and he could not help but hug her tighter to him, he could not stop his thoughts from lingering on Haema, his cruel smile, the story of Impa's death he'd whispered into his ear. Perhaps he had threatened her with the same story, or her uncanny instinct had happened upon this fiction in the same way it plucked near-prophecies from the stream of narratives that governed the world. "All I could think was that I didn't want to die that way."

Link did not know how else to distract her from the vein of conversation. He had to steer her, steer them both, away from this heinous dream of hers, no matter the methodology. "Well…" he started, voice hoarse. "How do you want to die?"

She raised her eyes to him, clouded with confusion. But in that cloud he could not see the image of Haema's hounds, hungry for her, he couldn't see the gleam of a blade. "Is that a question for so early in the morning?" He shrugged, and she turned herself over, laying a hand on her chin and stroking it. "How do I want to die? I suppose…" She frowned and he silently thanked her for humoring him. She rested against his chest once more, the panic and frantic heartbeat of her nightmare fading into the yellow morning. "I'd like to kill myself."

This did pique his interest. "You would?"

"Yes. I intend to live to a ripe old age, but when the time comes, I want to have one last degree of control over myself. Nobody else will have the privilege of killing me but me." He had to admit to himself he should've, at some level, expected that answer. "What about you?" she asked.

He thought back to those endless hours in his dark cell, about all the ways he thought he could end himself, about all the ways his captors could beat him to it. "I… I guess…" She turned her body against his, laying herself almost on top of him, examining his eyes, perhaps for any hint of dishonesty. "I… don't care how. I just want to be ready." He stopped for a moment to think, Impa's eyes laid intensely on his. "At the stables, you know, when a dog gets old and it just knows… it'll wander off from the others. I think maybe… I at least want to die _knowing_."

He could see the beginnings of a soft smile on her face. She leaned in toward him, eyes bright, but then hesitated. Her gaze stopped on the scars on his lips for a moment. "May I kiss you?" she asked.

His heart turned over at the request. The way she asked so politely, so matter-of-factly, it did not seem the least bit unnatural or uncalled for. Her question only made him ache with affection. "Yes," he answered.

When she pulled away, he saw something like pain cross her features. "I missed you," she said. It almost hurt to think about—that they had suffered and slept in the same dungeon nearer to one another than they might have thought. Perhaps they were in adjacent cells, perhaps within arm's reach of one another on either side of a wall, and never known. "I'm so glad, so unbelievably glad that we're here, alive enough to talk about death," she continued. "I don't think I've ever felt this relieved."

"Me neither." It was all he could offer. It may even have been true—he had never before been so resigned to hopelessness as he'd been when he was lying on the floor of his cell, caked in blood and grime, wounds fresh and lips still stinging with the prick of Barudi's needle. He'd never been as close to dying as he'd been when he'd fallen in the Eldine wilderness for the last time.

When Impa again rested her head against him, he lifted his good hand, running it through her hair, along the top of her long ear. They lay there in silence for a long while, until the house about them rustled to life. Voices in the kitchen, footsteps creeping from Talm's room, the groan of the woman in question being awoken no doubt by an exuberant Zelda. That girl greeted the day like a hound greeted a meal—voraciously, vociferously.

But Link was not quite ready to get up. Despite the house awakening around him, he wanted to lay here with Impa a little longer, to stroke her and talk about something a little lighter than death. As he ran his fingers along her elegant ear, he paused to play gently with the rings hanging from them. He was surprised they hadn't been ripped out in her captivity, but he supposed they were concerned with hurting her in worse ways—he stopped himself before his mind could descend too far into that dark place.

"I noticed… everyone here has rings in their ears," he said. It seemed the most benign thing he could say to keep Impa here, lying beside him, to keep his own mind off their recent trials. "Talm, Talporom, Palo, Merel…"

"It's a rite of passage for our people," she answered. "When we turn sixteen, we receive a pair. It celebrates the onset of adulthood."

"Why do you have three?"

Her smile quickened his pulse for a second. "Of course, I had my own pair done. But when it came time for Talm's, I did it again. She was so afraid of the pain, can you believe it, that I held her hand and went through the ritual again, just to show her it wasn't that bad. Merel allowed it, I think, because she thought it was amusing." She raised her eyes to the ceiling. "It seems so long ago, considering how much braver my little sister has grown since then."

"And this third one?" he asked, running his finger along the top of her ear, where another silver ring dangled.

"A Gerudo woman in Silk gave it to me. She said it would look good, and I have to say I agree. I suppose I've turned sixteen two and a half times so far." The lightheartedness of her chuckle made it seem as if she'd forgotten about her dream, about their talk of death. When she lifted her eyes to his, he saw her infinite relief, a brief playfulness, but he could make out the stern lines of the dutiful Impa he knew best. "We could do it for you," she said. He tilted his head, and she continued. "It's the least my people could offer you; you've served our tribe and our cause with the dedication of any Sheikah. And we have to repay you somehow. It wouldn't be fair if we didn't." She reached out and cupped his torn ear, gently running a thumb around the healed wound. "I've read piercing can serve as initiation. Though it's commonly a coming-of-age ritual, some of the older texts conflate the two."

He didn't know what to say. He imagined himself sporting the sigil and piercings of her people, a proud Sheikah foundling like Elpi (though found much later in life), and he couldn't help but grin. He wondered what tattoos he would receive, if he proved himself worthy.

"Would you like me to talk to Merel about it?" Impa asked.

He nodded.

"I'll wait until she's not so angry with me for sneaking away from my sickbed," she said. She lifted her eyes to the window. "So I will sneak back. Merel might try to keep me for a while longer, but I will show her I'm well enough to move about." With that she tried to lift herself from the floor, but her arms shook as she did. With a flush of embarrassment, she let Link help her out of the skins and into her clothes. He was nearly as weak as she and was hardly much support as he led her to the window. It took a few minutes of struggling between them to even open the thing, and as Impa slipped out, face pained, limping toward the elder's cave, Link had a hard time believing she'd convince Merel she had recovered.

* * *

The elder, as expected, did not consent to release Impa from her care for another few days—though she had nothing to say about Impa sneaking out on her. She did, however (somewhat miraculously in Link's opinion), agree to allow him to undergo the ritual. Under normal circumstances, the entire village would be invited, ready with food and gifts and with a fire blazing in the elder's hearth, but when Link got to the Elder's cave, grinning nervously, he saw it was a mercifully private affair.

When Link crossed his legs before the low, bluish flames of the elder's fire pit, the only ones seated around him were Impa, Talm and their parents. Palo, of course, lingered in the shadows as he always did, but likely not because he wanted to attend the ritual; the man rarely left the elder's side nowadays, and a steady pillar of firegrass smoke could be seen billowing from the mouth of her cave nearly every night.

Across from him, exuding more warmth than the fire itself, Talm and Irma chatted away about the events of the day, about their Hylian guests, about the next performance scheduled at the Old Riko Playhouse. Talporom sat with his arms crossed, staring at Link with furrowed brow (the man had barely spoken to him in the past few days; at first Link had thought he was angry with him somehow, but the look on Talporom's face was infinitely more complex than that). Impa sat beside him, one hand on his arm, as the elder, assisted by Palo, produced one of her many wooden boxes she kept stacked in the dark corners in case such a ritual came up.

Link had told himself he would be prepared for the ceremony. After all, the elder only meant the best for him, she would do him no harm, and he had sustained worse injuries than a punctured earlobe. Filing through his veritable library of lashes, cuts, broken bones and sicknesses, he could not come up with an injury more benign than a quick prick to the skin—especially if it was meant as a celebration.

But when the elder pulled a thin silver needle from her little box and held it to the light, his heart surged and turned, tossed by a strange storm inside him. When Merel held up the needle's edge to Palo's match and waited for it to heat to a healthy golden glow, Link broke out in a cold sweat. His eyes stayed fixed on the needle as it came toward him in silence (even Talm and Irma had ceased their conversation at the ritual's commencement), and his fists gripped the pillows under him. He felt his jaw clench and his teeth grate against one another, felt the eyes of Talporom burning his skin, felt the sting of his lips and the taste of hot blood on his tongue—

And Impa's hand on his arm, squeezing gently. He glanced to her, wide-eyed. Her concerned frown was tempered with anticipation—her healthful color and excitement at the ceremony should've calmed him, but he continued sweating, heart pulsing near his throat. She seemed almost amused at his sudden fear of a pinprick, after having lived through so much worse.

He couldn't explain it to her. He couldn't tell her, at least not at that moment, about Barudi's needle, about the things he'd seen in the throes of her thaumaturgy, about the blinding pain that had shot from his left hand to every inch of his body the moment he had snapped from his visions.

He could even feel it now: a burning glow, a sort of vague, discomfiting prickling sensation that started in his palm and crept to his elbow. When Impa's fingers squeezed his arm and the elder commanded him to lay on his back, it continued up to his shoulder, like his arm had fallen asleep and left him with no other sensation than an almost painful tingling.

Impa's hand moved to his, and she gripped his palm, easing the discomfort a little. "Impa…" he croaked. She leaned over him, seeming to understand that his agitation, the faraway look in his eyes, was not the same simple fear Talm's had been during the ritual.

She gripped his hand tighter, eyes settling on the tiny scars on his lips. "It's just a pin of metal, Link," she whispered. "It can do nothing but pierce your skin. No magic, no blood." She paused, and for a moment he wondered if she knew about Barudi's ritual, or if she could simply read his face that well. "But I won't make you do it."

"I can do it," he answered. He closed his eyes, then opened them again, thinking he'd better anchor himself in this moment, in this reality with Impa and Merel hovering over him, in case he lost himself in visions and white-hot pain the moment the metal met his skin.

And then Merel bent over him, needle in hand. She pinched one ear, then the other, perhaps to gauge where she should insert the tip of her pin. He prepared himself to feel that stinging, burning pain, to feel the length of metal draw itself through his flesh as she inserted the rings, but all he felt were her fingers squeezing, just a little too tightly.

Then she retreated with a bloodless needle, and bade him sit up. He lifted himself from the pillows, wondering why she had chosen not to complete the ritual—had she been repelled by his cowardice, had she decided he was not worthy enough after all, had she decided to save it for another day…

"Well," she said. "What is probably close to half a decade past the proper date, you've reached your sixteenth birthday. Congratulations." Link lifted his hand to his ears and felt a cold ring of metal in each, and he couldn't help but smile.

"Did you see him?" Talm asked her mother. "He was more scared than I was." She bent down to offer him her hand, and he took it. Her fingers were warm in his, her voice kindly, and she drew him to his feet with an affectionate tug.

"So, how's it feel to finally be a real adolescent?" Palo asked. "When you start growing a beard, let me know. I'll lend you my razor."

Link laughed, and as Palo led the elder back toward the darkness of the caverns, Talporom and Irma stopped to lay hands on his shoulder and congratulate him, Irma with a broad, humorous smile, Talporom with his usual look of slight agitation. They left through the mouth of the cave, back into the evening light, and Link lingered for a little while, staring at the fire. Impa sat beside him, touching his new jewelry gently (jewelry—it seemed absurd that he had some to call his own, even if they were plain rings, unadorned with any display of wealth or beauty).

"You've been pierced with much worse," Impa whispered.

He lifted his eyes, away from the fire and its shadows, for fear they might dance and change into the shape of a woman, red hair flowing, needle burning bright with visions that would plague him for months to come. "Just Palo's words," he said.

Her laugh grounded him, held him firmly to the floor and firmly in the warmth of the elder's fire. For a small moment, he stopped fearing the flames, stopped fearing the needle and the visions it brought. He could still feel the sting of the golden light make its way up his arm, but it resembled a sort of bizarre energy rather than a sharp pain. When Impa touched the back of his hand, running her finger along the crests of his knuckles, he thought, just barely—and it was probably the light of the elder's strange fire—he could see his skin glow.


	66. Friends and Lovers

"Summer back home in Eldin is hard to describe. It's a fickle season, beginning and ending only when it feels like it. Sometimes the province skips summer altogether and moves from spring to fall, and sometimes the warmth seems to last forever. But you know what they say, a good summer tempts a harsh winter."

Errachella, Eldine Performer

* * *

Impa's body, like Impa herself, was a maze of softness and hardness, a topography of stern muscle and yielding movement. As the days marched on, growing warmer by the hour, he discovered where she hid her gentleness, and how to navigate the hard shell of her exterior. He learned where to kiss her under the jaw to elicit a laugh, where on her earlobe a touch might send a shiver through her, how to run his hand up the knots of her spine. Of course, she was, and always had been, his instructor—she had been the first to get him to open his thoughts to others, she had been the first to hand him the hilt of a sword, the first to walk him through written words and the movement of a pen. Now she was the first of a different sort, but he was no less grateful for her teachings.

Her hands were her learnedness, deft and experienced from other lovers, quick to show him knowledge of her body and his own. Her lips were a sort of softness she rarely displayed to others, lingering over him, asking if she could do this or touch that (always, she asked, and always, his heart almost burst when she did). Her eyes were her intensity, full of meanings her words could not express; her arms were her strength, balancing her steady while she moved above him; her legs were her strictness, holding his hips in place when she wanted, giving way when she wanted. And between them lay the vulnerability they both shared, that they hid within one another, confessed to one another with touch and movement.

He had never shared anything like this with anyone before. To him, the act itself was animal, instinctual, and though he had seen it many times over, with horses, hounds and bold stablehands who invited lovers to the back rooms of the stable, it struck him as nothing other than a perfunctory necessity, meant for others but not for him. He knew the lovely girls on the street and in the pubs were not interested in him, and even if he'd experienced the occasional pang of desire, he'd never had the means to express it. It was a pleasure he rarely even shared with himself—growing up, when he navigated the soundless, meaningless vicissitudes of pubescence, there were too many eyes on him: the watchful glances of Talon and his underlings, the eager faces of hounds poking from each corner of the shadows, the large, black gazes of the horses as they blinked, eternally vigilant.

But here in the mountains, in the fresh air and the shadows of swaying trees, enveloped in pollen and bonfire smoke, there was privacy—or some semblance of it. It was a privilege he had only come across later in life—in the stables he had slept as publicly as he worked, but even here, amidst a crowded house, with Talm and Irma and Gwen chattering in the corridors, with Shaddon's echoing complaints, with Talporom's constant pacing and Zelda's juvenile parading, Impa and Link could find one another in silence and darkness, when all eyes were elsewhere.

That's not to say, however, the evolution of their relationship did not go unnoticed. Everyone in the house, with the exception of Talporom, perhaps, who had his face mercifully buried in tomes and scrolls nearly every hour of every day, had taken notice. Talm seemed amused but satisfied with the affair, bestowing her approval only after warning Link that if he ever hurt her sister she would castrate him. Irma would often acknowledge them with a wry smile whenever they passed, wringing her hands as if plotting something (Talm whispered to Link it was because she hoped Impa would pop out a grandkid and then promptly gift it to her). Palo had disappeared from the scene almost entirely, though Link knew better than to assume the deadseer had not noticed a subtle change in Irma's household. Even Zelda seemed attuned to it, often referring to them with the same monickers as her own mother and father, as if by virtue of being together made them a close substitute for her own parents. She was constantly calling out to them, as frequently as she did to Gwen or Shaddon, to come see something, to look at her, to pick her up, to sing to her or seemingly just to be around her.

Impa humored the girl as she would humor anyone. She seemed unable to comprehend Zelda as a mother might, or even as a sister or aunt—she spoke to the child like she was something of a forgetful adult, held her awkwardly or not at all, and did not reciprocate the meaningless, joyful babble, only stared thoughtfully at the child as she held her at arm's length, as if trying to decipher a particularly difficult code. If Impa had inherited anything from her mother, it was not the easygoing affection for all things cute. Though she was kind to children and animals, Impa reserved most of her attention for things which which she could hold a conversation. "Little Zee," as Talm called her, did not endear herself particularly to Impa by virtue of being a child—even though an absolutely irresistible one, in Link's opinion.

Impa could be soft, yes, she could be gentle and yielding, but these were privileges to be earned. When Zelda was at her best, Impa would indulge her, awkwardly and with much constraint. It amused Talm to no end, and she would parade around the house asking how that "frigid killjoy" could've possibly come from the same womb as a creature as beautiful and loving as herself. Talporom, for the large part, skillfully ignored the banter and babble in his house. He had no time for Zelda—he was constantly buried in his tomes and scrolls like some sort of antisocial scholar. Link asked Impa if he was always like that when he came home to Kakariko. "No," she answered, "but close calls like ours will make him study up on his medical lore. When Talm got the winter sickness a few years ago, he read for months without end, so he'd not get caught again by surprise." Link did not know how much of Talporom's reading was medical in nature; he caught him often buried in scrolls of legend, or even a little booklet on proper Goronic blacksmithing. Zelda did not seem to care that Talporom was so distracted—she'd run to him as she'd run to anyone, prattling, reaching, and sometimes he'd allow her to sit on his lap as he read, if she quieted down enough.

She spent her days flitting between her parents, Irma and her daughters, Link, and the outside world. She greeted every villager, every animal (Epona was especially dear to her), and seemingly every tree and flower, staring and giggling and eating knowledge of the world around her like other children might eat sweets. She begged for experience, for the opportunity to learn anything she could, and for affection, for the touches and smiles of everyone around her.

The only person in the village she disliked was Palo, although no one could quite figure out why. He had the same attitude toward her as Impa did, and she liked Impa well enough. He would ignore her more often than not, and he never hurt her or taunted her—or even spoke to her, if he could help it. At her best moments, she would sit in another's arms and stare at him from afar, never quite willing to get close to him, and at her worst, she would scream and scream until he left, hands over his ears, complaining that she howled worse than the dead. Each of them had several theories as to why the girl might not like him; "He smells like that stuff he smokes," suggested Shaddon—"Birth is quite close to death; so a young child would be disturbed by his tattoos," said Talporom—"He just doesn't like kids," muttered Talm—"He's a bit… odd," offered Gwen, generously. In the end the consensus was that Zelda was in fact a toddler, and toddlers were nothing if not incomprehensible.

* * *

When Impa dreamed, she struggled. It was something she should not have suffered from; she had been trained from childhood, like every Sheikah, to control her own dreams, but when a nightmare crept into her, she could do nothing but endure it. Images—or worse, nothing but darkness—would fill her head and she would find herself struggling, pulling away from the sound of a whip or the baying hounds, from the smell of burning flesh or the hot flow of blood on her back. In these moments, she lost all rationality, and her sleeping mind, usually so calm and controlled, turned against her. It was the same sleeping mind that had kept her sane while she was in her cell, distracting her with images of Link, with meticulous plans, with lists and possibilities, but it could not outrun her dreams. There was no way she could reason with her unreasonable unconscious, and no amount of medicine or firegrass smoke seemed to suppress her dreams completely. Even the hours she spent talking with Merel about the subject didn't seem to help as much as she would've liked them to.

But when she slept in Link's arms, the nightmares dissipated into the air like any other harmless thought—sometimes she was able to outface them by declaring to herself she was dreaming, sometimes she was able to avoid them entirely, and even when they beat her, when she squirmed and woke him, he would pull her out of that darkness into the waking world. When he'd shake her, she could lift her eyes again with prudent clearness, raise her face to his and smile with the relief that she had finally regained her rational, waking mind. Perhaps it was because he didn't dream; she supposed that was a mercy, considering all the things he'd seen and felt, not just in the King's dungeon, but in the desert, in the mountains while he had little hope for their survival.

It had been worst the nights she was sickest. But when she healed, when it came time to change her bandages less frequently, and then to remove them altogether, the dreams had diminished in number somewhat, though not in intensity. When she did not have to smell the odor of her own sickness, when she didn't have to feel the chafe of a bandage under her armpit or the sting of dried fluid shifting against it when she moved too quickly, her mind was better able to collect itself—it was better able to sift through all the duties her homecoming had brought on her, all the business she had planned to finish when she'd had enough time to think about it, down there in her cell. Making to-do lists was how she had kept the madness at bay.

She had already finished the chore of healing herself, though it wouldn't quite be done for another few weeks, when she recovered all of her strength. She had confessed her feelings to Link, and although the interaction had gone differently than the way she'd rehearsed it in her head a thousand times in her cell, he had still accepted her. She had apologized to her sister for everything she'd said to her at Roan, and Talm accepted it with teary-eyed relief, pulling Impa into her arms so forcefully she feared her bandages would rip. She had checked on Gwen and her daughter and found them both in excellent condition (much better than in the city, in Gwen's case; the woman insisted the clear mountain air did her a world of good). She had recruited her mother to cut her hair, she had recovered her beloved harp and made sure the princess was safe and healthy. Now she had one thing left, for the time being.

Though more than one part of her told her she wasn't, she was of perfectly sound mind when she confronted her father. As usual, she was upfront; beating around bushes was a skill neither she nor Talporom had ever bothered to master.

"Talporom," she said, and he lifted his head from his reading. He squinted at her, as if she were one of his tiny words printed on his endless scrolls. He seemed a little confused at her sudden appearance, so she steeled herself for his reaction. "I ask that you let me give Bloodletter to Palo."

He blinked, slowly, as if blindsided by such a ludicrous request. He sat in silence for a few unbearably long seconds, before lowering his tome. "What?"

"He can put it to much better use, I think, now that I have my harp to worry about."

"You don't want it?"

"That's not it. I just can't carry a harp in one hand and a sword like that in the other. On the eve of every fight I have to choose one over the other and increasingly I'm choosing the lyre."

Talporom closed his eyes. "Palo can have Bloodletter," he said, and Impa's heart rose—"if you marry him."

She sighed and crossed her arms. "Talporom, please."

"It stays in the family, Impa. It's what your grandparents would've wanted."

"Ishto and Renepa are long dead," Impa reminded him. "What they want is no longer an issue."

"Tell that to Palo, after you've given it to him. He'd love to hear that when he wakes up every night, because your grandparents have risen from their graves to berate him for unlawfully taking a family heirloom."

"Fine, then. I will marry him. There's nothing stopping me from keeping company on the side."

The frown that spread across Talporom's face told her she had taken the first steps on that proverbial thin line. "Despite a modicum of respect for our sacred customs, no, there isn't."

"That's hypocrisy at its worst, and you know it. Every one of you married folk in our tribe betray your lovers for the sake of your missions. Our customs don't stop us when we seduce information from our targets."

"That is for the sake of our cause, Impa, which is much more sacred to—" he stopped himself, sighing. "I am not going down this road with you."

"Father," Impa said. She kept her voice low, calm, but couldn't help clenching her teeth. "One can do with her own body what she wishes—and one can do with her own sword what she wishes, can't she?"

"It's not only your sword, Impa. It's _our_ sword."

"Then give it to Talm."

"Talm gets Bonesetter, we've been through this. And where did this insolence spring from all of a sudden? It's unbecoming of you."

She took a deep breath, biting her lip for a moment. "Forgive me. All my life, you've always tried to teach me the value of diplomacy. So I offer this—no… I ask this: allow me to lend Bloodletter to Palo until the time comes when I need it again."

Talporom's thoughtful frown gave her a little hope. "And when will this time come for you to take it back?"

"I don't know. When my harp breaks or my fingers do, whichever comes first."

Her father breathed deeply, turning her words over in his head. "Bloodletter is a sword I cannot stand to see wasted. If it will rust on the wall otherwise, we will lend it to Palo. But there will be no ceremony—no drawing of blood, no entreaty to the spirits. It will be nothing more than a tool in his hands for the time being."

Impa bowed her head, releasing the tension in her chest she hadn't known she'd bottled there.

"But," her father continued, "if he takes it as a marriage proposal, that's not my fault."

She smiled. "I never said I wouldn't marry him."

Talporom shook his head and shooed her away, and as she left the room, making her way to the door and out into the sunny day, she could not tell if he was more annoyed or amused.

Impa found Palo outside his door, smoking (to no one's surprise). He lifted his head as she approached, giving her that familiar sad smile he'd given her many times before, when he feared she would stop coming to see him, stop asking his opinion or staying awake with him well into the night, pontificating in deep, consequential tones about absolutely nothing. It was a smile that made her heart turn a little; a resigned, toothy, almost expressionless face that to anyone else would be meaningless. But she could read his impassivity like others could read emotion.

She sat down beside him and took the pipe when he offered it. "How's it going?" he asked, voice muted in the detached haze of firegrass. "I see you've wriggled out of your bandages."

She nodded, taking a quick, light breath before lowering the pipe. "I have." Not quite sure how she would break the good news, she let herself think in silence for a moment.

Palo took back the pipe. "I was a little worried you weren't going to, for a while there." He lowered his voice in that familiar way, eyes scanning the horizon of graves and trees as if on alert for some sort of intruder, some eavesdropper. "Hey, Impa. Your ordeal reminded me… you know, we only have so much time before we croak. So be sure to waste a little on me now and then, all right?"

A small fissure cracked its way across her heart, and she watched his eyes, wandering impassively across the humps of graves to the forest beyond. She knew what he feared, what he put aside and what he forgave her for. "You're afraid I'll forget about you, Palo? When has that happened? For whom have I _ever_ abandoned you—Gahnera? Erick? Anju?" He shook his head, reluctantly, almost guiltily, to each name. "Then it certainly won't be Link. Besides, he likes you just as much as you pretend not to like him."

"I don't pretend not to like him," Palo said. He paused for a minute, the corners of his mouth twitching in what may have been indecision. "Impa," he started again, after too long. "I know I'm like a jealous dog at your door. I hope he can give you all the things that I can't. But if he ever hurts you, if he ever oversteps his bounds, tell me."

"You don't trust me to take care of it myself?"

"I do, I just want to enjoy the process of punishing him with you."

She laughed, and couldn't stop herself from reaching over to wrap her arms around him. He let her squeeze him, and raised a hand to lay it gently on the back of her head. "Thank you, Palo," she said.

"I know you'd do the same for me, if it were necessary."

"I would. A thousand times over, I would." She lifted herself from his arms and brushed her hair from her eyes. "Remember, Palo, you'll always be my oldest and most valuable friend."

He flushed, turning away. "Eh, and you'll always be the person I hate least in the world."

She grinned. "Don't be like that. You love plenty of people; the elder and Talporom, Irma and even Link—especially Link. You were a big fan of Nabru, if I recall. You even condescend to like my little sister, when she shuts her mouth." He shrugged, and a small smile spread across his face. It was sad, defeated, a smile as red and pained as a wound, and she suddenly wanted nothing more than to heal it. "Hey, Palo," she continued, voice bright. "I actually came here to talk about something else entirely. I'm giving you Bloodletter."

The way his eyes widened, she half expected him to faint. "Why…"

"For the time being. Talporom and I have decided we will trust you with it, until I need it again."

His moroseness evaporated, and he rose to his feet in a wave of happy smoke. He'd admired the blade for as long as Impa could remember, and had laid more than one half-joking claim to it, should she die. But he had always respected Talporom more than anything, and had never asked, never even suggested they might let him use it. But now, as Impa took his arm in hers and led him away from his hut, he couldn't stop smiling.

"But Palo, remember," she continued. "If you mistreat it, I'll kill you."

He squeezed her arm. "Wouldn't want to die any other way."

* * *

When it finally came time for Talporom to remove Link's splints, Impa couldn't stop herself from watching. She held his good hand as her father unwrapped the strips of cloth and gauze, pulling their transparent lengths and examining them in the light of the elder's cave. After a few quiet minutes of unwrapping, of Talporom muttering to himself in fragments of the old language, Link's hand lay exposed.

The splints that held it together were numerous and convoluted, each one supporting the others as much as they supported Link's fingers. Cracking over his skin was a hard grey substance that reminded Impa of clay. When Talporom produced a thin chisel of steel and lay it at an angle on the material, Impa squeezed Link's good hand, gritting her teeth. The doctor steadied a small mallet and in one swift motion (followed by moderate twitches of anxiety from both Link and Impa), struck its end into the stuff. It cracked and fell away bloodlessly, revealing the unharmed white of Link's healing skin. Talporom brushed away the last crumbs of the material, removed the remaining splints and cut the final length of bandage in one quick dance of his fingers, and Link's swollen and pale hand came into full view.

Impa had remembered briefly glancing at it during their ride to Eldin, but she could not quite picture how it had looked then. She knew it had been bad, but she had also been thoroughly distracted by starvation, blood loss and the creeping beginnings of her wasting sickness. She did not remember exactly how mangled the limb had been, but when she saw it now, it struck her as if her father could've done better.

It was soft-looking and pale, gnarled with bumps of swelling—his middle and ring finger bent at a noticeable angle, and it appeared as if the nail of his pointer had fallen off entirely. Impa had the feeling that if she leaned over and pushed her finger into his skin, it would compress like soft dough.

"It's ugly," Talporom admitted, "but it's much better than I expected it to be. You're lucky we didn't have to cut it off." Link raised the hand to his face, unbothered by the damp, almost nauseous smell of dead and healing skin. "Show me how you can move your fingers."

Face contorting in effort, he managed to bend all five. He could not bend them independently, nor did he have the strength to ball them into a fist, but he could move his thumb quite well and Talporom seemed pleased enough with that.

"You won't regain full function," he said. "So you're going to have to learn to adjust. You aren't planning on taking up the harp anytime soon, are you?"

Link shook his head, smiling.

"Then you'll be fine. Since it's your shield arm, I can see what we can do about fixing you a special buckler, or some sort of gauntlet. But it's likely you won't be able to hold much with it as it is now."

Link nodded, lowering his blue eyes. He intently watched the tendons on the back of his hand pull under his skin as he moved his fingers. "I didn't think I'd… get to keep it," he said.

"Neither did I, when I first saw it," Talporom answered. "And it was damn hard to make sure you could. So don't go breaking it again."

With that, the doctor removed himself, patting their shoulders and leaving them both to stare transfixed at the limb. Link seemed to regard it as something of a foreign object, something alien and new. Impa could only hope he'd recover from that feeling. He had been staring too much at his hands lately anyway.

* * *

It was decided a few days after the removal of his bandages, when Link dropped his cup for the dozenth time, spilling wine over the table, over Gwen's dress and over Zelda (who had seemed rather too pleased with the accident, licking her lips and fingers free of the stuff), it would do him good to exercise at least some strength back into it. Since Irma's second harvest of vegetables would not arrive for a few weeks, it seemed a hunting trip was in order. Talporom had shut himself in the elder's library and buried his head thoroughly under the piles of books, so Palo offered to provide some food for the family (he barely ate anything except for what Irma offered, so he said he owed them as much). He was to take Link with him and see if a good few days of bowhunting couldn't wrestle some strength back into that feeble hand of his. And they could, Impa hoped, if either of them had any emotional adeptness at all, talk out whatever resentments might still linger between them.

It was also generally acknowledged that something needed to be done about Shaddon. He had stayed cooped up in Irma's house for so long, chattering about this and that nonsense, he seemed to everyone to have gone a bit mad. Perhaps it was the sudden change of atmosphere, perhaps it was something of culture shock, perhaps it was boredom—in any case, he wasted away in Irma's living room and was not quiet about it. His wife contributed to the upkeep of the house and the livestock, so she was busy enough, but since Shaddon didn't stoop to such domesticity, all he seemed to do was sit around and blather.

Palo was not happy to learn he was to take Shaddon into the forest and show him how to hunt, but he grit his teeth and gave into Irma's request (she had the same irresistible, passive power over him that she had over every member of the family). He left with Link and Shaddon in tow, each carrying their bows awkwardly—Link because of his hand, Shaddon because he hadn't so much as looked at a bow in his life. Palo muttered to Impa as he left he very much expected the man to die in the wilderness. Impa made a bet with herself that it would sooner be by Palo's hand than by nature's.

She stayed behind, keeping the other women company; though she would've preferred to go, she knew four was too much of a crowd for a hunt. Besides, she didn't often get to sit around the house and worry herself with domestic duties—even after all these years of watching her mother mend and cook and wash, the processes were still novel to her. Sure, she could pull off a few stitches if her clothes were falling apart, or cook something edible if starvation were her only other option, but she didn't have the knack nor motivation to hone such skills.

Irma now sat at the table, under the open windows, sewing with Gwen, while Impa was charged with holding Zelda in her lap so the child would not run around the house dumping the contents of the pots and jars on the floor (her newest hobby). Zelda was not unhappy with the situation; she would babble contentedly as Impa tried to figure out what she was trying to communicate. Occasionally she would spit out a couple words—even strung together in comprehensible sequence—but it was much more interesting to listen to Gwen and Irma talk about seemingly nothing at all as they drew their needles in and out, in and out.

Her mother had decided to sew Link a new green hat—she and Talm had gone to Old Riko to pick up some material, but so enamored with its strength and color, they had brought back far more than they needed. So after Irma perfected Link's hat (which he was not allowed to take hunting should he lose it), she started on a tunic. She seemed so taken with this project she had hardly done anything else these past few days—she spent hours making sure the length of the arms was perfect, that there were enough pockets on its inside, that the layers and folds of the material held fast—she even started embroidering sigils on its front and back, Sheikah and Hylian, and had moved on to embellishing its extremities. Impa had known her whole life that her mother enjoyed this sort of thing, but she seemed to spend more time on this particular project than she had making clothes for her own children. Impa guessed it might have been a way of thanking Link for carrying her sick and incapacitated daughter on his back through a good portion of the Eldine mountain range.

Gwen sewed something a little simpler—just a new patch on a dress Zelda had managed to rip on one of her outdoor misadventures with the other Sheikah children. That girl could stumble around with the best of them, and perhaps in the future, if her overprotective father could be outmaneuvered, she could fight with the best of them, too.

"Pick me up," Zelda commanded Impa, wiggling her fingers at her.

"There's little point in that, isn't there? You're already sitting in my lap," she told the child, but Zelda could not be satisfied. She just babbled nonsense until Impa lifted her and held her tight to her chest, where the tip of her newest, biggest scar extended above the collar of her loose shirt. Zelda quieted in her arms, finally, and she could listen more easily to the other women.

"Gwen, you never really told me your story," Irma said, pulling another dark thread through the collar of the tunic.

"Oh, it's not very interesting… When I was seventeen I married Shaddon, later I had Zelda… and, well, you know the rest."

"No, Gwen, your _story_. I hope you're comfortable enough with me after all this time to tell it. Your husband isn't around to hear us, so give me all the gritty details." Irma worked fast, eyes never leaving her fingers, but a mischievous simper twisted her lip a little. It was a grin she shared with her youngest daughter—the utter joy at the prospect of a good, sordid tale of love and lust. And as if on cue, Talm herself poked her head out of the hallway, undone curls bouncing, like she had smelled the promise of a romantic yarn through the stone walls.

"Well… um…" Gwen started haltingly.

"Tell us about little Zee's father," Talm said eagerly. "Oh, don't make that face—we already know your dirty secrets." That much was obvious; it was the reason Gwen was here in Kakariko and not back in the Capital. "Besides, it's just us ladies here, and we don't talk."

"You say that like you _will_ talk," Gwen said, biting her lip.

"We're Sheikah," Talm assured her. "We don't talk."

"Where… where should I start?" Gwen asked, more coerced than reassured. Impa had half a mind to tell her mother and sister to leave the poor woman alone, but Gwen almost wore the same impish expression as the others. Her tongue poked delicately from the corner of her mouth, but whether in concentration or guilty excitement, Impa couldn't tell.

Irma tied another knot and threaded another needle expertly, carefully. "We'll be here a while, so start from the beginning."

"Well… um… I'm the only daughter of Aren Blackwood—"

"Blackwood?" Irma interrupted. "I almost got married to a Blackwood—Dillan, you know him?"

"I think I met him… once at a family gathering. He's some sort of uncle of mine, I think."

"That makes us near-cousins, I suppose," Irma laughed, eyes still fixed on her project. "But continue, I didn't let you get very far, did I?"

"Um… well, being a Blackwood, I went to a school in the inner quarters of the Capital. You know… those fancy schools where you're basically groomed for marriage. Not like I had any higher hopes for myself. But… it's funny. I suppose if I hadn't gone there, I would've never met Daph." Gwen paused her sewing, a shy smile rising to her face. "His sister was enrolled there, two years ahead of me. She was so smart and funny, and she had a talent for magic most could only dream of, but she was so strong-willed, they had to hold her back for a few years. She… when we ended up being in the same class, she helped me when I struggled, she comforted me when the others were cruel… She was so nice to me, and even though she was a few years older and so behind the others in her age group, I still looked up to her. It wasn't that she was stupid or anything. No, she was just… she got into a lot of trouble. I was never brave enough to follow her on her adventures, though. Everyone but the instructors liked her—she had lots of friends, but she was my only one. Her name was Zelda, too." Talm had seated herself at the edge of the table, folding her hands and watching the women sew. "After we graduated, we lost touch. She disappeared into the city somewhere, to bigger and better things, and I returned home. It wasn't too long after that I was introduced to Shaddon at some party or another, and before I knew it I was married to him." With each pause, with each breath, her voice grew louder, her shyness ebbed, and she lost herself deeper in her own story. With each length of thread she pulled through the cloth, she pulled out a little more confidence, a little more willingness to divulge. "At first I was happy, I really was… but it was so hard for us to… you know, conceive. We tried everything. We thought there must've been something wrong with me, and he was so upset about it… So I started looking around for help. I must've tried a dozen apothecaries, but nothing seemed to work. I felt like I was wandering around for nothing. And then, on one trip to… I can't remember if it was to a doctor or not, I ran into Daph. I think I was…" She slowed her sewing for a second and lifted her eyes. "I think I was looking for something to eat. Someone had given me an herb me to relax me—oh yes, he told me I had to be relaxed and comfortable to conceive. It made me so hungry, for some reason, so I went searching for a good restaurant, and found Daph." Talm scooted closer, smile spreading. "I remember seeing him, when he visited his sister, back when I was at school, and he looked so much like her—maybe a handsomer, much older version of her. He must've been fifteen or so years our senior, but he didn't seem like it. I said hello to him, and he to me, and he offered to buy me a meal, so I sat down and we just… talked. I asked about his sister, and he told me she had died earlier that year—it was so sad and sudden, I think I started crying at the table." She reddened and shook her head. "But he comforted me. We talked about her for hours, until the place closed and they shooed us out. I went to my home and he to his, but I knew I wanted to see him again—I mean, just to chat.

"I had no idea it would turn out… like it did. I had no idea he was so clever or strong or kind, but he was his sister's brother after all. We could talk for hours on end, about anything—it wasn't too long before he told me about his… political leanings, and introduced me to some of his friends at the Last Resort… but I had no interest in that sort of thing. I never thought I'd end up… well… I didn't know that he had the blood of the old royal family until much later on. Not until I was pregnant. I just thought he was… idealistic. He was open—too open—about his goals, about his beliefs, and since there was nothing interesting enough in my life to talk about, we talked about his. But we grew closer, and before I knew it I was in his bed. I didn't… I didn't know what happened, or if I meant for it to happen, but all I knew was that I finally felt, you know… appreciated."

"Was he _good_ , though?" Talm asked, and her mother reached over with her free hand to gently smack her ear.

"I don't know… he was… he _was_ , actually," Gwen said, reddening intensely. She seemed both humiliated and exhilarated; Impa supposed this may have been the first time she'd talked to anyone about her affair—or about her life, really. Gwen was so long-suffering and silent, Impa couldn't imagine she'd spoken at length like this to anyone before. "I felt good with him, I didn't feel anxious or… pressured. And I wished to all the gods I had gotten to know him before I'd met Shaddon, but as it was I had a husband and we couldn't be seen together. He had a daughter from a previous marriage—I met her a few times, but we told her we were only acquaintances. It must've been strange for her… she was almost as old as I was. We promised to never tell her that when I got pregnant, that it was her half-sibling. We wouldn't tell anyone. Shaddon was pleased I was pregnant at all. And I didn't want to ruin it… I remember I was really scared during that time, but happy, too.

"When I told Daph I wanted to name the baby after his sister if it was a girl, he was furious with me. He said that name was cursed, that it was Zelda's name that got her killed; he said every woman in his family with that name had met an unnatural end. I think it was then that I realized his family was something bigger than just a resistance group that published a few pamphlets now and again. He told me he swore to save any daughter of his from bearing the curse of the name, so I told him I'd put off naming the baby until it was born. I thought up substitutes, and Shaddon was quite eager to name it after someone in his family, but I knew that the baby was meant, just somehow _meant_ to have the name. I can't explain it—I mean, I didn't even know it was a girl yet. And when… well…" Here, she paused to take a breath, voice shaking. "When I got the news that both Daph and his daughter were killed, I knew it wasn't just the name Zelda that was cursed. I think it was their whole family, and whatever political mess they got themselves into. So I stayed away from it. I stayed with Shaddon and I never mentioned Daph again, but every day… every day I miss him still. And every time I look at Zelda's face, I see a little bit of him, you know. I just hope she grows up to be like her father, and her aunt, of course. I think she's already well on her way."

Gwen's eyes wandered to her daughter, still wriggling happily in Impa's arms. Impa glanced down at the child's face, at her blue eyes and wide, easy smile. It did eerily resemble the face of the yellow-haired girl, glowing from her window like a beacon. "What was Daph's other daughter's name?" she asked.

Gwen put down her sewing. "I'm sorry?"

"Daph's first daughter. What was her name?"

"Alda."

"Alda," Impa repeated. She said the name twice over in her head, letting the shape of it sit on her lips in silence. Somehow, uttering the name made it seem as if a tiny shadow over her past had been lifted, one small mystery solved in the convoluted mess of mysteries she called her life. She supposed Link would like to know—she would tell him when he got home from hunting.

She set down Zelda, and the little girl looked at her with glinting eyes. Somewhere around them, Gwen continued, elaborating on the complex love she still felt for both her husband and her deceased lover, but at this point Impa had stopped paying attention.

"When you become a queen," she whispered to the child (she had her full attention, miraculously), "you will be surrounded by dignitaries that will want to marry you off to someone or another. But you will marry whomever you want, or, if you prefer, no one at all. You won't face the same pressures your mother did, I'll make sure of it." She lay a hand on the girl's cheek. "You will have to hide nothing, you will never have to lie or live in exile as you are now." The child looked up into her eyes, blue irises clear, and for a moment, Impa was quite sure the precocious girl understood every word she said, every subtle motion in her face.

"Pick me up," Zelda commanded.

* * *

Just popping in to say thanks to all who've read or reviewed! Jeez, just looking over the past few chapters, we've had a bit of a slow run. Don't worry, things will pick up a little in the next one. See you in a bit!


	67. Tales from the Eldine Forests

"If a Sheikah elder tattoos only those in the village who does not tattoo themselves, then who tattoos the elder?"

 _The Man of the Lake's little book of Riddles_

* * *

As Talporom stood in the shadows of the elder's cave, he tried not to bite his nails. Under his arm he'd tucked a lifetime's worth of history lessons, rolled and bound and burnt at the edges. Before him Merel sat, hands hovering, as usual, over her fire. The scent of firegrass burned the back of his nostrils, but he ignored it.

"Elder Merel, I've pored over all the old scrolls like you asked me to," he said.

"And?"

"And I think I have narrowed down a few places where we'll find the other pieces of that sword."

The elder's head creaked on her neck as she turned to smile at him. "Good. And what of its reforging?"

"I can't find any possibilities." He set down his tomes and seated himself across from the elder, sighing. "It is repeated often the blade of evil's bane can only be Goron-forged. And we have no Gorons left to do the forging."

"Which is unfortunate," the elder replied. "But we will have to do what we can. The King will not wait for us to perfect our weapon before he seeks us out."

A cold bead of sweat trickled down the side of Talporom's face. "Do you think he knows? I mean, about Link, about Zelda?"

"Of Zelda, I cannot say. Of Link, there is little doubt." The elder moved her hands over the fire, gnarled fingers bending and straightening, smoothing out a clear picture, though one Talporom couldn't see. "You've seen the scars on the boy's lips."

"I have, though he avoids talking about them."

"I can barely blame him. Those are the marks of ancient blood-magic. The signs of a spell that has not been practiced since the Faronian Uprising. It is a complex incantation, but it allows the caster to force the recipient to answer one question, and only one."

"What question do you think they asked him?"

"A question whose answer they could not have possibly wrested from him using simpler means. The spell is dangerous, equally likely to turn on its own user as it is to work successfully—even with a witch as skilled as a rova casting it." She closed her eyes, a look of certainty passing over the shadows of her fire-lit face. "They asked him a question he did not even know the answer to." At the confused tilt of Talporom's head, Merel continued. "No matter how you coax, or bargain, or torture, you cannot get information that a man doesn't even know he has. So this spell was their only recourse."

"So…" Talporom started. "They asked him who he was." Merel nodded. "Interesting. Back in the desert, Link told me the King kept a close eye on him. Maybe he's always known, or at least suspected…" Talporom cupped his chin and shook his head. He would never have guessed it, were it not for such strong evidence piling up around him like laughter from a bad joke. That such a pale creature, so soft-spoken (when he spoke at all), so gentle, more eager to sleep than to fight—it seemed such a terrible jest on the part of fate. Then again, the boy had proven himself courageous, and perseverant, perhaps too much so. "He just doesn't seem to fit the part," Talporom said. "Not at all."

"Indeed. He doesn't appear to play that role, but there are plenty who know the difference between appearing and being," Merel continued. "Palo and Impa brought him to me against all reason. And even your wife, who does not know the old stories, has made him a tunic of green and silver to rival the ancient depictions," the elder replied. "They all can sense a peculiar greatness in him."

Talporom paused for a moment, recalling the project his wife had started before their hearty fire, needle and thread in hand. He thought of the tough cloth, and the agonizing meticulousness with which she sewed each stitch. An almost sickening feeling rose in his stomach. "We should keep him here, in the village," he said. "We can keep him safe, and—"

"Oh, Talporom," Merel almost laughed, "that would be the only way to ensure that he does not live up to his potential. If he holes himself up in safety, there is no guaranteeing the power would not flee from him and enter some other, worthier person, somewhere far away, far beyond our grasp. There is no courage without risk, we both know this. And he will not allow us to keep him here. But don't worry, Impa will take care of him."

Talporom bowed his head, but he couldn't wipe the scowl from his face. The elder lifted herself from the fire, brushing the dust off her blue robe, and shuffled toward him. "What is it?" she asked.

"It… it is unfair," he said. "He has suffered so much already. He and my daughter both."

"Their debt to the gods has yet to be repaid, Talporom. Link and Impa must serve them further—that much is obvious."

"Taking away Impa's music was not payment enough? Having her tortured, having her body racked by starvation and disease wasn't enough for them? She has endured much as it is, Merel, they both have."

The elder shook her head sadly. "So have we all, according to our own measurements. But the god-spirits do not give gifts freely, nor do they measure repayment on a scale we can understand. Remember what they gave to your mother; remember what they took away. Her prophetic warnings may have saved your life again and again, but they also took hers far too soon."

Talporom, despite his best intentions, could not stop himself from clenching his teeth. "Far be it from me to challenge the gods, but I think they've toyed with my daughter quite enough."

"It is not your place to defy the gods on her behalf. And she certainly won't. She has received their gifts and curses with equal grace—perhaps it will do you good to emulate her." The elder smiled and closed her eyes. "She knows as well as anyone it takes the heat of a flame to reforge a blade."

Talporom sat for a while in the light of the fire, thinking. "We should tell him. We should tell Impa, too."

"After they heal," Merel said. "They have been through much, as you said, and have sustained grave injuries. Let them find as much joy as they can in the quietness of village life. I will let you know when the spirits have decided it is time."

Talporom again lowered his head, and let the elder walk away, back into the darkness and safety of her cave, back into the world of fire, smoke and clairvoyance she had subjected herself to since she had first figured out the nature of the metal shards Link had delivered to them. As he watched the fire die, he thought he could see in its light a long road, winding and treacherous, stretching out before him. But when he squinted, when he let his heart hope and his mind clear itself of worry, he thought he could see it come to an end.

* * *

The months passed, mercifully, in peace. Each day, Link grew a little stronger, healed a little more. Palo, who had found their hunting trip with Shaddon to his liking (watching the man struggle so earnestly and clumsily with a bow—and Link beside him doing practically the same thing—had elicited from him laughter so loud it cleared out every deer in the near vicinity), invited Link virtually each week. Shaddon, ego cracked and crumbling under Palo's amused smile, opted out often, which was fine, since it left more time for Link and Palo to walk comfortably in complete silence, or talking of nothing important at all. Palo never brought up Impa, and Link did not broach the subject—instead he focused on Link's hand, binding it to the bow when he was too weak to hold it, letting him exercise it by taking clumsy shots at their quarry before Palo finished the animals off. He did not seem discontent—or, only as discontent as he always had been—and Link knew he had Bloodletter to thank for that.

The man had taken up the sword with a terrifying enthusiasm. Since Zelda's screams and protests had made Irma's house a loud, inconvenient place for him, he could more often be seen in the training yard, getting his bearings on the gargantuan weapon. Link, of course, was the deadseer's primary opponent, and though he ended each day with more than a few bruises and sorenesses in muscles he did not know he had, he had to agree with Impa when she said it was good for him.

With each hunting trip, with each session in the training yard, a little bit of feeling returned to his hand, a little bit of numbness made its way out. His fingers were perpetually stiff and his muscles did not respond with any strength or accuracy, but if he concentrated, he could hold a cup, he could pick up and tickle Zelda when she demanded it, he could stroke Impa's cheek as he kissed her or roused her from her dreams, he could haul firewood when a _temokai_ rolled around for a new birth or for the reception of a young adult's new tattoos.

When it came time for the winter festival, he helped carry Irma's offering up to the elder's cave (that year, they managed to secure venison, as tradition dictated). Talm was again chosen to channel the spirits of the mountain (the third year in a row), and he gave her an encouraging smile when she knelt before the elder's box of sacred oils and dyes, dressed in her bright costume. As Talm started to dance, as he listened to the drums and chanting of the villagers, he couldn't help but grin in relief. He had an easy time enjoying the sacred strangeness of the ceremony, since he knew what to expect, but out of the corner of his eye he glanced Gwen and Shaddon leaning back, something of a horrified look on their faces. He figured he probably looked the same way the first time, and as Talm lost herself to the will of the spirits, swaying and swinging her arms in a manner not entirely human, he had to reach over and touch the pair gently, silently reassuring them that despite the green smoke, the unnatural light and the almost unearthly chanting of the villagers, everything was perfectly normal. Zelda seemed nothing but fascinated with the display. She leaned forward in her mother's lap, arms outstretched toward the transient white ghosts of spirits, reaching for the fishy eyes and hoofed feet and rocky backs. And when the dance was over and the feast began, when Talm, sweating profusely, had thrown herself on a pillow beside the child, she had wanted to know everything. At a little older than two, she didn't quite have the vocabulary to express her overwhelming curiosity, but her tugging hands, her babbling and repetition made clear what she was asking. Talm had been too exhausted to answer her at length, and Merel was too busy handing out the year's charms (Link confessed to the woman that he had lost his, but she had only laughed: "That's why I give them out annually, boy; _everybody_ loses them"). Impa had been the only one willing to explain to the child and her curious parents what had transpired during the festival. Zelda listened to the whole thing with bright eyes, with an open mouth and just a hint of a smile, and Link swore the girl must've understood every word of the story.

It was almost unnerving, the precociousness of the child. She was curious—insatiably so—and wandered the village every chance she got, asking around, following the older children and visiting the animals. Often she'd disappear from under her mother's nose and return in the arms of another parent, wide-eyed and full of new experiences. She ate and spat out seemingly dozens of new words every day, and she was never seen unoccupied—she would imitate Irma and Gwen as they worked in the house, talk to Epona and the goat, chase Link and Impa around whenever afforded the chance. Shaddon was struck especially hard with exasperation, since he had expected nothing less than a lovely, docile daughter worthy to be called royalty. Most of his relatively unoccupied days he spent chasing her down, picking the leaves and twigs from her hair and scolding her profusely for her inappropriate behavior. He told her it was no way for a little girl to act, much less a princess, but she always brushed off his disapproval, much to his chagrin. Gwen seemed happy enough with the child, though she admitted often that she did not quite know what to do with her.

"Let the village help raise her," Irma said one day in response to this quandary. She and Gwen chopped meat in the kitchen, while Link stirred a brewing pot of mulled wine over the fire. Outside in the snow, the sisters sparred, and Zelda, wrapped so thoroughly in skins she resembled a sphere more than a child, watched intently. "She gets along well with everyone—and so cheerful. Rarely throws tantrums." It was true—the only times the girl screamed at all was when Palo showed his face on the scene; she had never quite outgrown her irrational fear of him. "She reminds me a lot of Talm when she was that age. Fast, strong, curious, uncontrollable—even looks a bit like her, too." Irma paused to wipe her forehead on the back of her sleeve, smiling. "Except for the hair. You should've seen her hair—I don't know where Talm got that untamable mop."

"From one of her grandparents, maybe?" Gwen offered.

"Maybe. I don't remember either of them having hair like that. But my sister, Uskra, she had the same hair—came out with a full head of it, and my parents had no idea where she got it either. She's the one, you remember, who married a Blackwood. We came as a package deal for a pair of Blackwood brothers, but she stayed when I ran off."

"I haven't been introduced to any Uskra in my family yet," Gwen said. "I would've remembered a name like that, I'm sure."

"Yes, well, you know more than anyone how preposterously big your clan is," Irma said. She sliced a length of fat and twirled it in her fingers for a second. "You probably don't know half your relatives. I haven't seen Uskra for more than two decades, so even I might not be able to recognize her in the sea of Blackwoods now."

"Have you thought of visiting her?"

Irma shook her head. "No, she… she wouldn't want to see me, anyway. I did an unforgivable thing, running off with Talporom on the eve of my marriage." She straightened herself, took up her knife again and resumed cutting. "But that tale is over. It's far in the past, and belongs in the past. It's our own daughters we should focus on now, isn't it?"

"Yes, I suppose."

"I think the wine is ready," Link announced from his place by the fire.

"Good, good," Irma said. "Take it off and pour us some. Call in the girls, too." Link nodded and pulled the wine from the fire, putting as much weight on his right hand as he thought he could. "And you, Gwen, don't worry about Zelda. She won't always be such a handful. She'll grow, she'll learn, and you don't even have to have a hand in it. She'll change for better or worse. I remember when Impa was a baby, she was silent and scared and so timid, but by the time she started to walk, she got defiant. Then again, that was right after they handed her to Mardon to be blessed—maybe it was the Goronic touch that did it."

"Mardon?" Gwen asked.

"One of Talporom's oldest friends was the brother of the Goron patriarch Durmia. Near the end of the Eldin War he came down to visit us—well, to visit my husband, mostly. Talporom's brother had just died near Leda, so Mardon left his post for a few days to check up on him. I was so scared to hand Impa to him, you should've seen me, shaking like a leaf. Gods, she fit so easily in the palm of his hand I thought he was going to crush her. But he was nothing but gentle; he'd fathered what… eleven sons by then? I learned that Goron babies are born soft, like clay, to be molded by the hands of their fathers and then tempered by the fires of Death Mountain, or so Talporom tells me. Ah, thank you." Link had placed beside her a generous glass of mulled wine, and she wiped her hands on her apron to pick it up. "I suppose you wouldn't remember the Eldin War, would you, Gwen?"

Gwen took the wine Link offered and raised it to her lips. "No… I wasn't born then."

"Weren't you?" Irma squinted one eye. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-one."

Irma frowned widely, playfully. "A babe, still! You can't be that young." Gwen lowered her eyes and blushed, and Irma turned on Link before he could get to the door and call in Talm and Impa. "You, Link, how old are you?"

"I don't know," he answered. "Probably about the same." He supposed it wasn't an unreasonable guess. Sorting through his memories and the moments of history that coincided with them (like the coronation of the new King), he knew he should've been around that age. Though he didn't need to shave as regularly as Palo or Talporom, he knew he was certainly past his teenage years. Beyond that, he could only guess.

Irma narrowed her eyes. "Don't make me feel old, Link. Go get the others." With his best charming smile, Link obeyed, making his way to the door and calling out to the sisters. Impa replaced her sword and hauled Zelda across the snow, setting her in Link's arms as she passed by. The girl wiggled and laughed, and he quieted her with a kiss to the forehead before he carried her into the eternal warmth of Irma's house.

* * *

Word from the outside world was discouraging, but uneventful. With the arrival of a messenger or a coded letter, they would all scramble to hear the news, but their anxiety waned when each letter proved to be nearly identical to the last. The Capital was busy but peaceful—apparently the King had settled down with his new wife quite happily, and concerned himself with the bureaucratic drudgery of post-annexation politics. New ministers were appointed in the desert, insurgencies were put down, Obra Garud council members backstabbed and bribed and rebelled and repented. There was mercifully no bad news about the surviving children of Ahnadib and their underground rebellion in Silk—though from what Sheim had written, the brothers had proven wanting in solidarity. It appeared that after weeks of heated debate, the only course of action they had managed to agree upon was to call themselves by the gender-neutral and all-inclusive monicker _Galinedh-Ahnadib,_ translating roughly to "the legacy of Ahnadib." The only news of any import was that a giant named Nabru ahn-Molgud had proved herself to be the face of the movement, making up for what the brothers lacked ("She would," Palo had muttered to himself, smiling with approval). Tensions in the west remained high, but there were no straggling patriots (or displaced sons of a wormsilk tycoon) who mustered enough strength to reignite the fires of dissent in the region—at least not yet. If Sheim were to be believed, though, Nabru was trying her best.

The Capital was abuzz with excitement; the marriage of their King and the union of their nation with their desert neighbors meant citizens were becoming more politically active, Gerudo migration to the city was on the rise, and the unified military was flexing its muscles. The King was consolidating his forces, which was expected, and he did not seem too concerned with the pursuit of his escaped prisoners. Though there was some word about the city of a demonic horse who had galloped up from hell to rescue a wrongly-accused nobleman from public mutilation ("They're—they're talking about _Epona_?" Link had stuttered in surprise), the city had quieted down about the incident months ago, and the King showed no signs that he cared where they had gone. Perhaps he knew they were beyond his grasp in the labyrinthine Eldine mountains, perhaps he just found himself busy with more important activities. It was almost as if he'd forgotten about Link and Impa completely, not to mention his prized warhorse.

The horse in question grew restive as springtime descended. She had stayed in her makeshift lean-to for most of the winter, feasting on wild grasses and what Irma had dried and preserved for her from the autumn's crop. But she had not been ridden at length for months, and would sometimes pace for hours and complain, snorting and whinnying, until Impa, equally as agitated, would stomp outside and strum her harp until the horse fell into a deep but reluctant sleep.

Impa's yearly restlessness had hit her full force. Perhaps it was that she had been weak and bedridden for too long, perhaps it was that she had been confined to the village for more than two seasons already, but even the freezing water of the annual spring dip couldn't wrestle her from her frustration. Most of this particular emotion had been expressed throughout the winter in eerie notes coaxed from her lyre—she had been practicing relentlessly, almost violently, pitting herself both against nature and combatant with nothing but a few strings at her disposal. And her practice paid off—she could start fires, banish a storm, play almost anything to sleep, crack tree trunks and send jolts of pain so intense up her opponent's legs he would have to drop his sword and forfeit their matches. She especially liked contending with Palo, and test her new weapon against her old. Those fights could go either way—sometimes he would find an opening to slash with the blunt edge of Bloodletter while she concentrated too hard on her finger-work, sometimes she could heat the metal in his hands enough that he would have no choice but to drop it. And now that spring had arrived and her yearly agitation with it, she grew less charitable in the yard each day. More often than not a bass string would bruise, a high trill would draw blood, and a well-placed glissando would bring nightmares for days afterward. So the others increasingly found other things to do—Link worked ceaselessly in the kitchen, Talm retreated into the forest to hunt, often taking her father or Shaddon with her (she, of all of them, did not seem to mind his company), and Palo fled up to the elder's cave, concealing them both in an impenetrable wall of smoke.

When the wildflower blooms raised their heads and opened, when the last snows blew across the mountains to the northeast, Palo found himself sitting in the elder's cave nearly every day, smoking, talking, learning. She had elected to teach him bits and pieces of the old language, in which he quickly learned the most expressive and heinous curses (he prided himself on always being fluent in vulgarity), and he was permitted to sit around and watch while the elder taught Talporom everything she had ever learned about healing. Despite Talporom's insistence to the contrary, the elder knew she only had a few more years left, and was adamant that she pass on all she knew before she was to join their ancestors in the sacred fields of the afterlife. Palo knew this—not because of any special abilities granted by his status as deadseer, but because each week or so he noticed she needed a little more sleep, spoke a little less, asked for a little more firegrass. She was in great pain, that much was obvious to him—though she would never admit to it, and would certainly never complain about it.

So he gave her all the conversation and firegrass she wanted. The last weeks before he was assigned a new task, banished from the village on a new adventure, always bored him (though he never expressed it as violently as Impa did), so he didn't mind whittling away the hours with the elder. When he sat with her, opening up a conversation or offering the pipe, her eyes always brightened, her wrinkled smile spread across her face.

"What have you brought me this time?" she asked one sunny afternoon, when the last snow in the village had melted and Impa had killed nearly all the songbirds in the trees with the screech of her angry harp.

He placed a wooden box before him and opened it. "I have some of Temon's stuff—he says its a subtler variety, good for pain, good for sleep, bad if you want to stay up smoking and writing poetry all night, which is apparently what the dandies are doing in Old Riko. I bought it last week when Link and I went to town." He pinched a little and filled the pipe. "His damn horse followed us down again. I think it's about time he started riding her again—she clearly wants him to."

"There aren't many safe places to ride so high up in the mountains," the elder offered. She picked up and carefully rearranged the two scraps of metal before her (the pieces hadn't left her fireside for weeks, and sometimes she could spend hours just staring at them, thinking).

"Well, she doesn't care about safe, does she? Remember, she left a few wolf corpses in her wake while she traversed the northwestern range—I say give that horse everything she wants before she snaps and takes us all out."

The elder laughed. "Kakariko is no place for a charger, I'll admit."

"Yeah, well, I think Link will be taking her the next time he goes on a mission. Though I can't imagine people won't notice a horse like that. Especially since she's supposed to be the King's."

"Yet her presence will do him more good than harm, I've no doubt."

"You see that in your fire?" Palo gestured to the pit, now empty and dark.

"Merely a gut feeling," she answered. She took a puff and paused for a moment. "How are the dead treating you lately?"

"They're getting louder, Elder. I don't know why but they seem more restless than usual."

"It is common for a time of unrest, I'm afraid. You should've seen the deadseers from Ikanokana during the Eldin War. They said it would be a mercy when they finally got to join the wailing ghosts instead of having to listen to them. Even the Kasuto treetalkers said the plants were screaming."

Palo sighed. "I'm managing. Mostly I'm just thankful that Link and Impa aren't among them. For a while, after she first came back, I was worried she might leave without me."

"Well, what would you have done then? Followed her?"

"I thought about it." In truth, he had not thought so much about following her into death as he did about beating her there. Dying after her wasn't really an option for him—nor, when he thought about it, was dying after Talm, or Link, either. He had seen too many lost souls, wandering the wastes between life and death in agony and confusion, screaming for rest. People were as stupid in death as they were in life—few could find their way into the next world on their own, especially the young ones. The older they lived, the likelier it was they could make it, but untimely, violent deaths, the ones most likely to meet Impa or Link or Talm, cast souls into the labyrinth more often than not. And he couldn't risk losing any of them in the horrible fog that straddled the wasteland between life and death. He trusted Merel to find her way on her own—even Talporom or Irma, but not the others.

"Impa would not have wanted you to do it," Merel offered, though both of them knew it didn't need to be said. "Besides, you're the only Sheikah deadseer in this world. You're the last one left—you cannot abandon us so easily."

"Well, in that case," he said, taking a puff. "I may have just kept Impa around. Maybe I would've—"

"Don't even say it, Palo. You know that magic is forbidden in our tribe."

"Yeah, I know. It's not like I can raise the dead anyway." That particular talent appeared in their clan only once in a century or so, at least. And that was when deadseers were common as weeds.

"You might. But you do not know—and we'll strive to keep it that way. The last time a deadseer attempted resurrection, the elder at the time had no choice but to banish her and erase her name from our history. And when she died, her soul, like in life, had nowhere to call a home—for when you toy with life and death you lose a part of your soul that delivers you from damnation."

Palo raised an eyebrow. He couldn't guess why the elder warned so suddenly and emphatically against something he only ever dared to joke about. Even when his parents died, he had not thought to bring them back—though he was too young at the time to entertain the thought it was even possible. "All right, Elder," he said. "Consider me thoroughly warned—"

Suddenly and entirely without fuel, a fire roared to life in the elder's pit. It licked toward the ceiling, smokeless and blue, and Palo threw himself away from the violent blaze. Slowed by his firegrass-addled brain, he took a second to stare at the flames before he realized it must've been his fault for taunting the elder with the topic of raising the dead. "Hey, Elder Merel," he started, not taking his eyes from the fire. "I told you I was warned—you don't have to try to scare me like that."

But the elder didn't answer. She, too, had her eyes fixed on the flames. She had raised her wrinkled hands toward it, transfixed by its glow, wholly oblivious to his words. When Palo saw her paralyzed by the sudden inexplicable fire, he figured she was as surprised as he was to see it suddenly light up without her consent. He closed his eyes, staring through his tattoos to see if any of the restless dead were responsible, but when he saw no one, he knew other, older spirits must have lit it. He realized, with a wave of something like pride, he was witnessing what may have been technically considered kind of a big deal.

Just as suddenly as it came, the fire died. With a puff of smoke, the last light disappeared, and Palo found himself in immersed in complete, confused stillness. He sat frozen at the edge of the fire pit, clutching his pipe, wide-eyed. It almost hurt to break the silence.

"Elder Merel?" he whispered hoarsely, but the woman remained perfectly motionless, hands still outstretched. Her red eyes stared widely at nothing, as if she had seen something so frightening it had petrified her where she sat. "Merel?" he said again, louder, but still, she didn't move.

He wondered if it was simply a ritual or ceremony he hadn't seen before, or if he had finally overloaded her with firegrass. _I did it_ , he told himself. _I finally broke the elder. I knew this day would come._ He wondered if he should run down and fetch Talporom, or if he should leave her as she was—he didn't know how he'd explain to the others what happened exactly, or ask how they could get Merel up and running properly again.

He was just pulling himself to his knees when Link saved him the trouble of running back down to the village. His shadow appeared the mouth of the elder's cave, brow furrowed in his usual look of innocent contemplation. He looked from Palo to the motionless elder, then back to Palo, frown widening. "What's wrong?" he asked. "I thought… I heard someone call my name."

Palo raised an eyebrow. Though he was the first to acknowledge the sheer prevalence of ghostly voices floating in the tree-rustled wind of Kakariko, he didn't expect Link to hear them as well. Maybe the kid had a little talent for the macabre in him, but Palo doubted it.

"Nobody called you, but you're still welcome to help." He tilted his head to the stiff and silent elder, and Link stepped toward her, good hand outstretched.

"Is she all right?" he asked.

When Link approached, Palo could see something reflected in his eye, a strange, purplish glow, as if a new, dark fire had sprung up in the pit. The deadseer turned from Link's face to the elder, and spied something move at her bent knee. He narrowed his eyes, pushing himself to his feet when a blackish haze rose from the pit. It curled in the air before the elder, edges twisting and puffing with purple light. A terrible wave of cold billowed from the pit as the thing grew and stretched, setting Palo's stomach to turning with each movement. It pulled itself toward the roof of the cave, elongating and distorting until Palo could make out the shape of something nearly human—a pair of wide shoulders, long arms, a lolling head with two glints of violet light for eyes.

It didn't take a lens of truth to know the thing that pulled itself from the empty fire pit was less than benevolent. As it rose to its full height, pillars and clouds of darkness rolling off its broad form, Palo pushed himself to his feet, cursing his luck. He tried to reach out to Link, who stared down the shadow with a look of confused worry, but the phantom, once fully sprung from the darkness of the pit, wasted no time. With a paralyzing growl, it lowered its head and launched itself, arms outstretched, toward Link.

* * *

Phew! Another chapter down! Merry whatever-you-celebrate (Christmas, Hanukkah, Sheikah Winter Festival, etc), everyone! Hopefully some of you have been enjoying the DLC for BOTW, I know I have (although SPOILERS this DLC has sort of ruined Urbosa/Zelda for me, because for some reason I find something very odd about shipping a girl with her surrogate aunt/dead mum's ex-lover). The master cycle has been a delight, I love it so much more than my horse because it CAN'T DIE and I still have very guilty feelings about the trail of horse corpses I have left in my wake.


	68. A Phantom

"The proper name for the home of the Gorons is _Drach'an Elfranch,_ a somewhat difficult collection of syllables that translates roughly to 'The Mountain of Long Sleep.' It refers to the dormancy of the volcano, and the state of sleep to which all Gorons rest in the end of life, waiting, like the mountain itself, to one day reemerge to the surface. While this translation is arguably more poetic than the better-known appellation 'Death Mountain,' the racial purge of Mandrag Elgra has more than justified the monicker. Now, when one mutters the name 'Death Mountain,' one refers not just to the title of a place, but of its history. For there are no mountains in Eldin province, or any other, that have seen the spillage of so much blood."

Ernst Shad, _The Student's Companion to Lost Languages_

* * *

Link had never seen an evil spirit before. The Gerudo spoke of them often, about malevolent wights who screamed across the windswept sand, but he had never known a Sheikah spirit to mean harm. They had all been indifferent at worst, never granting favors they did not expect in return, but never going out of their way to attack one of their subjects.

But as the shadow swept toward him now, he had to tell himself it wasn't merely a trick of the light, not an illusion conjured from the benign magic of the Sheikah elder. It stared him down with a petrifying intensity—he could feel the breaths of shadow roll off it in bone-chilling waves. As it thrust itself toward him, one foot before the other, he found he couldn't move. He clenched his jaw, trying to shut out the terrifying growl of the ghostly creature, but as it flew toward him, all he could do was throw his arms up before his face, waiting for moment when its fleshless hands ripped through him.

When the impact came, it was warm, physical, and from the complete wrong direction. Palo smashed into him, shoving him out of the way of the spirit, and they rolled to a painful halt by the far wall in a tangle of knees and elbows. Palo pushed himself off Link, red eyes wide, and struggled to one knee as the spirit twisted itself at the mouth of the cave, turning again to face them.

"Are you o—"

The Sheikah couldn't finish before a beam of darkness hit him, throwing him from Link's side and into the wall of the cave. With a grunt he splayed across the stone, collapsing in a motionless heap of cloth and limbs. Link didn't have time to help him up—he barely had enough to throw himself out of the way of the oncoming shadow as it crashed against the wall, bursting into a thin cloud of black. He rolled away, back toward the fire, toward the motionless outline of the unperturbed elder. He glanced over his shoulder to see the shadow float past Palo without hesitation, its cloudy, shapeless form collapsing back into humanoid limbs. As it reassembled itself, long, thick legs stretching from its core and pushing it from the rock, Link desperately sorted through his options. He could try to lead the spirit away from Palo and Merel, he could try to fight it head-on, he could flee the scene and return with help (he was sure Impa's harp may be of some use against the phantom), he could try to reason with it—

He evidently spent too much time thinking. Before he could decide on a course of action, before he could put up his fists and try to fight off the spirit or turn to run, it hit him full force. Black hands gripped his throat, ghostly limbs pressed cold against him as the unexpected, almost physical weight of the phantom knocked him to the stone ground. As he fell, arms flailing, he thought he saw a glint of yellow in the eyes of the specter. A familiar scent filled his nostrils, like the sweet smoke of an extinguished match, and for a moment he recognized a face on the phantom, he knew the curve of its nose and the wide grin that flashed across its face.

He struggled with a renewed vigor, hard floor against his back, arms flailing. He kicked and squirmed, hands groping for a weakness, but the phantom just tightened its grip on his throat, clouds of darkness billowing from its freezing body. Link cried out, but he knew he couldn't call for the elder, he couldn't call for Palo. He was alone, pinned, losing a fight that was his and only his.

In their desperate grasping, his fingers felt something sharp. He felt cold metal, a quick shock of pain, the heat of blood against his palm, and realized his hand had closed around one of the shards of metal that lay next to the elder's fire. He gripped the fragment, gritting his teeth, ignoring the stinging in his palm. With a cry he tightened his fingers around the metal and jerked it up from the stone. He slashed outward, watching the blue-white glint of the fragment flash toward his attacker in a spray of shadow and blood.

When the metal met the head of the phantom, a harrowing screech echoed from its formless mouth. It released its grip on Link and twisted its body, hisses of black steam pouring from the wound. Link pushed himself from the floor and struck again, slicing across its shoulder, then again at its neck, each blow sending the phantom reeling in pain. With a fourth strike, straight and true, to its heart, the phantom screeched, throwing back its head and exploding in a shower of dark smoke. Its humanoid form evaporated into the darkness, shedding steam and shadow. With one last chilling wail, it disappeared into the incorporeal ether, echoes of its chilling voice rebounding between the cave's walls.

Link stood for a moment, paralyzed, staring at the spot where the phantom had disappeared. After a few seconds of numbness, pain crept back into his hand. He dropped the metal with a sharp clang and turned when he heard a groan from his right.

As Palo sat up, holding his head, Link rushed to kneel at his side.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

The Sheikah glanced down at his bleeding hand. "You're worse off than me, it looks like." Link turned his palm and watched a new gush of blood drip down to his sleeve as Palo pulled himself to his feet. "You check on the elder, I'll get something for that."

Link, clenching his hand to stem the bleeding, walked over to Merel and bent to get a good look at her. She was serene, absolutely still, perfectly undisturbed by the preternatural chaos around her. Her eyes didn't twitch when Link said her name. "She's the same," he called to Palo, who returned from the darkness with a few bandages.

"Sit," the Sheikah said, and Link obeyed, letting Palo take his hand and wrap the length of bandage around it. His fingers were warm, comforting against the sting of the wound as he wiped and dressed it. "Always hurting your hands, aren't you?"

Link shrugged. The cut wasn't bad—his hands had endured much worse.

"So, any idea what the hell that thing was?" Palo asked.

"No."

"Great." He tightened the bandage around Link's wound and patted it. "Well, that should do. I've learned a thing or two watching Merel teach Talporom." He frowned for a moment, holding Link's hand in his and staring at it thoughtfully. "It's a little weird, how you said you heard someone calling your name."

"I did. Though…" Link tilted his head, flexing his stinging hand. "It wasn't a voice I recognized. But I knew it came from here." He wondered if it had been that malevolent spirit, summoned from gods knew where, and bent on enticing him into a fight.

"Maybe…" Palo's voice faded as his frown widened—still, he didn't quite let go of Link's hand. He just seemed intent on staring at it as he shook his head. "What the hell. Weird voices, dark phantoms… Link, I'm too high for this shit."

Link chuckled, lifting his unhurt hand to rub at the back of his neck.

"Spirits' love, when I asked for a sign, that is not what I had in mind."

Both of them turned at the sound of the elder's voice. She still sat by the fire, legs folded under her, but her consciousness had returned, the tattoos on her forehead wrinkled in dissatisfaction.

"Elder?" Palo asked, releasing Link and stepping toward her.

"I'm fine. Run down and fetch Talporom and his daughters. Link, you come here."

Palo and Link exchanged a look before the former trotted out the mouth of the cave, and the latter readjusted himself, lifting his eyes to the elder. She wore a frown that made him fear she might've been cross with him—perhaps the spirit he'd fought had been of her making, and he had ruined something for her by cutting it down. Still, he knelt before her, bowing his head slightly as she waved her hand over the fire, summoning a benign, mundane flame. Beside the fire, the two pieces of metal glinted, one clear and blue, the other still stained with his blood.

"Link," she said. "You must forgive me. I have been praying for a sign, for a symbol that your time of rest is over. I did not expect the spirits would elect to test you without my consent." She nodded to the shards. "But both you and the fragments have seemed to pass that test. Tell me, what form did it take?"

"Form?"

"Phantoms do not appear on whims, they do not take a shape without meaning. What was it?"

Link lowered his eyes. "The King."

The elder sighed. "Of course it was. You are still haunted by the ghosts of the things you have seen and endured." She paused for a moment, looking at the shards, one clean, one stained with his blood. The phantom had left no sign of itself on the blade. "You know there is one way to sever yourself from the King's shadow, there is one way you can free yourself and this country from his grasp."

Link closed his eyes. Something separate from fear, from desperation, flickered to life in him at that moment. It was rare, almost unfamiliar to him, but it burned in his stomach, jolting through his muscles and forcing his fists to clench, despite the pain. Images flashed through his mind, of Impa's scarred back, of a little Gerudo girl collapsing broken to the ground, of an arrow through the throat of the yellow-haired girl—Alda, Impa had told him. Her name was Alda. He realized, almost with a jolt of surprise, he was angry. "I have to kill him," he whispered.

"You know the power he holds. There is only one blade that can cut him down."

Instinctively, his eyes wandered to the shards of metal glinting in the firelight. Link had assumed they had some value despite their outward appearance—at least to Merel, who was a woman who measured value on a scale mysterious to him. The realistic part of him had expected the scraps to collect dust with the other ancient artifacts piled in the maze-like halls of her cave, each more uselessly mysterious than the last. But a different part of him insisted otherwise. No matter how benign, no matter how easy they were to forget, they had lingered at the back of his mind like an unsolved riddle. "Tell me, Elder—" He cut himself off when he heard the voices of Palo and Talporom as they ascended the slope to the mouth of the cave. He glanced up and watched their shadows against the mid-afternoon light, before the elder reached out and tilted his face back toward hers.

"Link, do not let the phantoms of your past hinder you, do not let them hurt you. When you're mired in doubt, remember the little charm I gave you at the winter festival." She lifted a gnarled hand and gestured to the wooden trinket he wore around his neck. "It will help you through your difficult moments."

He nodded. "Your last one certainly did."

"I give them out for a reason," she said, smiling as the others approached. The elder bade them sit around her fire, and they all dropped to the floor—Talporom with careful consideration for his aching knees, Impa with her agitated energy at the promise of a new assignment, Talm as if she were nothing but eager to fall down and take a nap. Impa reached out for Link's hand when she saw the bandages around it, leaning to examine him with a solicitous frown. "How did this happen? Palo said something ridiculous about a fire and a spirit."

"He is quite all right," the elder informed her. Her wrinkled red eyes wandered slowly between the faces of her guests—Talporom with his perpetual glower of detachment, Palo rocking beside him with that interested half-frown a stranger would mistake for a look of mild contempt, and Talm, who seemed altogether too tired to bother noticing what was going on. "The spirits have told me that it is time for our work to begin.

"The King musters his troops in the north. With a Hyrulean and Gerudo army at his back, he will march to Ordona to continue his campaign of reunification. We have little hope of stopping him. Though the _Galinedh-Ahnadib_ have gained support since the winter, mostly thanks to our friend Nabru ahn-Molgud, we can expect little help from the region. Despite her efforts, the situation in Silk does not appear to be moving in our favor. I will be commanding Sheim to stay with them to keep communication frequent… but we have to face our own failures. We have already lost the west. We have lost our greatest ally, and the only force who could've opposed the King. And now he will take Ordona."

"Elder…" Palo started, but cut himself off when she continued.

"If Ordona falls, Eldin will have lost its last possible ally. Then, the King will turn his eye to us. And we will not be able to resist him." The elder nodded to Link. "And do not think that he has forgotten about you, either. That man is not one to be discouraged by failure. If anything, it will only strengthen his resolve." She paused, looking at each crestfallen frown. "But do not wear such faces. Not all hope is lost. We still have an advantage—several, if the spirits are to be believed. Talporom." She gave the man in question a conspiratorial nod. "There is a little girl living in your house who needs guidance. This is a critical stage in her life, and she will need you—and me—around to teach her. You will be learning quite a bit yourself, since I will not rest easy in death until I have passed onto you everything I know." Talporom's mouth tightened and he released a discontented breath through his nose. "As for the rest of you… well, I have received unequivocal confirmation from the spirits. The shards are indeed the remains of Hylia's blessed weapon, the blade of evil's bane, the sword that seals the darkness."

This seemed to catch the attention of those around the fire. Eyebrows were raised, backs were straightened—even Talm sat upright, suppressing a cough. Only Talporom seemed unsurprised at the statement.

"Link," the elder continued, "you have already collected two pieces of the blade. That is a portent enough you were meant to use it. You know as well as anyone why we must now collect the remainder."

Link reddened as he felt eyes on him, and he looked to his crossed legs. The humanoid shape of the phantom still moved fresh through his mind, and he clenched his bloodied hand. He didn't know how he knew the elder was right.

"Elder… really?" Talm ventured. When her sister gave her a poisonous look, she frowned defensively. "I mean… I've seen that 'evil's bane' stuff mentioned once or twice, in the older texts, but I've also read about boomerangs that summon storms and arrows made of ice. Everyone knows better than to believe in stories like that."

Merel, invincible in her conviction, nodded. "Of course they do. Which would hide the existence of such legendary weapons from the world at large, wouldn't it?"

Talm shrugged. "You can kill with any sword if it's sharp enough. Even a broken blade draws blood, or however the saying goes. Why go after a sword that might not even be real?"

Before Impa could reach over to hit her sister atop her curly bun, Merel shook her head. "Do you think I have time to waste, Talm? Do you think I would dare to throw away your effort on a fool's errand? You may think it a lost cause, but I know a thing or two about them. There is a little royal lost cause living in your mother's house right now."

Defeated, Talm lowered her eyes and apologized.

"What I want to know," Impa started, raising her glare from her little sister, "is why the sword was broken, and where we can find the remaining pieces." It didn't surprise Link for her to ignore the more cryptic words of the elder. She seemed unconcerned with the ostensible legendary status of the weapon and more eager to go straight for its practical implications.

"One of those questions is unanswerable, the other we can only speculate," Talporom said. He wore something of a credulous look on his face—Link wondered if this talk of legends moved him as much as it had moved his eldest daughter—namely, not at all. "Since there are so few extant accounts of the sword, there's little we can go on, but according to what I've read, the disassembly of the blade may have been the doing of one person, or many. It may have been a move to preserve the weapon in good faith, or it may have been an attempt to destroy it. We may never know who shattered the sword or why—what we know now is that its pieces are hidden in spiritual hubs across the land. Two of which you've already visited." He nodded to Link and his daughter. "I have pinpointed several additional possibilities. The closest one is Death Mountain."

A discontented silence fell over them for a moment. "Death Mountain?" Impa finally said. "Is there a way inside?"

"Not that we know of," Talporom answered.

"It's probably for the better," Palo put in. "It's gotta be crowded in there—and not with company anyone living would like to keep."

"Elder," Impa started, "are you sure there is a piece of this weapon inside? This blade of evil's bane, as you call it?"

"It is very likely. You have found two pieces so far—both at spiritual fulcrums of the land. And from what is told in our oldest scrolls, such a point lies in the belly of Death Mountain. There is also evidence in a more recent tale, one that tells of Durmia's brother Mardon forging him a knife of blue steel, a piece of metal that could put an end to what their race called the _dr'chem escha_ —the prince of darkness. They believed only that steel could sever a family line as strong in black magic as the Dragmires'."

"Though he never told me of it directly," Talporom said, "he had forged his brother a knife of the metal of evil's bane, though it appears Durmia never was able to use it. Perhaps the knife is still there, in the depths of the mountain—"

"It's not." The way each eye turned to Link made him regret his interruption. But he could not stop himself, he couldn't let those around him follow false hope toward a faulty conclusion.

"What?" Talporom asked.

"The knife isn't there. The one Mardon made for his brother." Link took a breath, wringing his hands in his lap. "The King fought Durmia in a duel near the end of the Eldin War—right?" He waited for looks of approval from his elders. "He told me that during the fight Durmia pulled a knife on him. It was something unexpected for a Goron to do, wasn't it?"

Talporom nodded. "It was supposed to have been hand-to-hand, following Goronic rules. They were both bound by honor—it wouldn't surprise me to learn Ganondorf had broken the rules of the fight, but Durmia…"

"The King said it surprised him too," Link admitted. He almost felt guilty, as if he were defending the man—but he knew he had to relay what Ganondorf had told him, even if it revealed the lesser-known flaws of the Goron patriarch. "But he showed me the knife. He said there were Goronic runes on it, to 'seal darkness,' just like you said a moment ago. He wears the knife at his hip now."

Talporom looked over at Merel, who pursed her lips in thought. "Have you seen him use it?" the elder asked.

"No," he admitted.

"Have you even seen him touch it?"

"I've seen him touch the hilt. He never drew it in front of me, though. I thought he only wore it for decoration."

Link could feel the intensity of Talporom's gaze on him. "Are you sure?" At Link's nod, the Sheikah man turned his eyes to the elder once more. "It could be that he can't bring himself to use it. Or it pains him to. Though either way, we have a problem on our hands.

"Our immediate actions change only slightly," the elder said. "We need access to the forges of Darun if we want to remake the weapon. If Mandrag Elgra and her army could not find a path into the mountain to conquer Goron City, there is little chance we can—but there is a chance. Which is why I am recalling Elpi from Silk. If there is a bombcraft technician alive who can find a way inside, it is she. If she finds that there is indeed still a piece of the sword in that dark place, I will be much relieved. But it is equally important to gather the other pieces. Talm, Palo." The two in question sat up a little, ears perked. "You both must forgive me, but once again I am sending you into a province plagued by war. To Ordona, where in the southernmost regions, there is said to stand a temple that once housed the blade in its entirety. Let us pray there's a piece of it there still." Palo looked displeased with the assignment but bowed his head anyway. "Link and Impa, you are tasked with retrieving the final two pieces. From what Talporom has dutifully gathered, there is likely one lying deep in the shadows of the Lostwood, and the other in the bowels of the domain that once belonged to the Zora race. It is your task to gather these pieces and bring them to me."

"And what about the King?" Palo asked. "Does he know about this… weird weapon of legend?" His tone conveyed a skepticism only healthy for Palo—but coming out of anyone else's mouth would've bordered on insolent.

"For safety's sake we must act as though he does," the elder said. "But lately he is concerning himself with matters of state, not chasing legends into the mist. That is our job. We, who pay homage to dying spirits, who live in the shadows on the brink of extinction. It is almost absurd, is it not?" She laughed, but the others didn't dare to laugh with her. "But we have done well, considering. We have traced the feeble royal bloodline to its last member, following nothing but rumors on the wind. And we have found ourselves a vessel of great power, due to nothing but Impa's good instincts." When the elder's eyes fell on Link, he lowered his own, biting his lip. "We will survive, as we always do. We will overcome failure and disappointment, we will continue no matter the consequences. It is in our blood, and our souls." She gave them one last smile, and as it faded, she almost seemed to shrink, eyes dull, head drooping. "Forgive me, children. I grow tired so easily nowadays."

As Talporom rose to help her, she waved for him to sit back down, preferring instead to retreat into the darkness alone, leaving the five of them sitting motionless around her empty fire pit. "I am counting on all of you to do what I cannot," she said as she disappeared, voice hoarse with effort. "Do not fail me."

* * *

"There she goes, getting that misty look in her eyes again."

As Link slipped his new hat over his head (it fit him much better than his old—and was gloriously devoid of holes and rips as of yet), he followed Talporom's red gaze. Irma, who had been busy helping her daughters gather their things, had stopped mid-work, raising a hand to her throat and balling her fist there, eyes glazed.

"She always gets like this when her daughters leave. And she doesn't seem to draw comfort from the fact I am staying here with her."

Link fixed a leather belt across his new tunic and stared at it for a moment. "I've wondered… why she doesn't go on missions like you do. Everyone else seems to—even me. And she's lived here so much longer than I have."

Talporom crossed his arms and sighed. "She doesn't take part in that aspect of our way of life because she doesn't want to. She doesn't like to fight, she doesn't like to travel too far from her home. She's used to the role she was told to take back in Faron, as a homemaker and mother. And I cannot do anything but respect her decision—after all, it's her decision. That's why she ran away from home in the first place, because there, they don't allow for decisions like that." With a couple blinks and a deep breath, Irma seemed to recover herself, and wandered to the wall where the cloaks hung. When Talporom looked down and saw Link struggling to secure his sword sheath across his shoulder, he reached over to help him with the leather strap. "Though, she never wished this life for her daughters. She wanted them both to stay home and play music, to help her with the house. But that is not our way, at least not in times of strife. A baby's barely out of the womb before we put a knife in its hands." He wore a discontented frown as he pulled the strap tight and patted Link's shoulder. "Is there anything else you need help with?"

Link shook his head. He had a sword and shield, an old hunting bow Palo had given him, a full quiver, good boots and sturdy new clothes, rations and a special gauntlet for his weak right hand. He had a few rudimentary lessons in healing Talporom had given him when he found the time, and a small pack of dried herbs and bandages. He would have to tack up Epona in Kakariko, since the Sheikah kept no riding equipment in their horseless village (or, as Talm now referred to it, a literal one-horse town). He had everything he needed, except for, perhaps, a proper goodbye.

Shaddon said his farewells with a stiff handshake. He did not seem to completely comprehend what was going on, but he had learned to endure the quirks and habits of the people with which he now shared his life. He just watched them go with a small smile as his wife pecked cheeks and curtsied. Gwen seemed content enough—after all, it was not her business to know what her Sheikah neighbors did abroad, since her job (which she did well and with much enthusiasm) was to raise her daughter in peace until the time came for her to reclaim her throne. She may even have looked forward to the house being a little less crowded, or the prospect of not having to share her daughter with so many people.

Zelda, on the other hand, was not happy at all with the situation. She seemed so sure that once Link walked out the door he would never come back. She wept and screamed, clutching at his legs and occasionally beating at his calves with her little hands. She wailed and writhed, telling him—commanding him—not to leave. Whatever words she knew she threw at him like projectiles—he hadn't thought a toddler capable of all the creative iterations of "no" she tossed his way. Eventually her mother managed to drag her off him, clutching the wiggling child in her arms and putting on as patient of a face as she could.

"Say goodbye, Zelda, you can say goodbye, can't you?" she offered, to which Zelda only screamed. When Link strode over and took her tiny fat face in his hands, she quieted a little, sniffling, cheeks flushed with the effort of fit-throwing.

"I'll be back, little Zee," he told her, which did not comfort her one bit. She just gripped the sleeves of his tunic and bunched them in her fists, gasping and blubbering. After he kissed her red forehead and mussed her hair, he pulled away and waved, having no words left to comfort her. He couldn't exactly tell her he was doing this for her. He couldn't explain to her the reason he had to leave, how he was embarking on a journey to acquire a weapon to kill the man who ruled the kingdom and then place her on its empty throne. It would no doubt seem as absurd to her as it did to him, thinking about it at that moment.

Talporom reached over to straighten his hat as Link tore himself away from Zelda. He mumbled something about wishing him the best of luck, but he couldn't finish before his wife was all over Link, clutching his face and planting kisses on it. Irma moved between him and her daughters, jittering with worry, shedding goodbyes in every form: words, pats, kisses, squeezes. She followed them out as they walked through the yard under the spring light, Talporom close behind. Standing in the shadow of her house, her husband's arms wrapped around her, she watched them go with wide, teary blue eyes—Link made the mistake of looking over his shoulder at her as he made his way down the hill.

* * *

Heyo! Happy new year everyone! Tuesdays are getting increasingly hectic for me, so I think I'm going to change update day to Sunday. It's better for me, and it might be for you, too... and if you like Tuesdays, I mean... they're not gonna rot between Sunday and Tuesday, hah. So expect one not this Sunday, but the next. So in a little less than two weeks. See you then!


	69. The Shores of Lake Hylia

"'It is dangerous to go alone,' said the old sage. 'Then I shall not go alone,' the young adventurer replied. 'I shall bring a steadfast companion with me. Simple as that.'"

Etran Olrani, "The Story at the Beginning of the World"

* * *

The inn at Ferryman's Way resembled a lean-to as much as it did an actual building. It slanted against the town's stockades like a drunkard, creaking and wailing every time so much as the smallest carriage rumbled by. Its stables were no better; the walls were more rot than wood, the roof so low Epona could barely fit inside. It was probably just as well, since it was difficult to notice her unique features when she was so cramped in the rickety darkness. Impa's horse looked like nothing more than a pony next to the charger, and Link couldn't help but fear that someone might recognize her as the King's missing mount. He had bought her a plain caparison in Kakariko to hide her distinctive color, but there was little they could do for her size.

"It's not like anyone in this backwater town is going to be looking for the King's horse," Impa said to him, when she caught him staring at the stables through their room's cracked window. "Besides, you think she'd let someone steal her from you?"

Link shook his head, turning from the evening light and removing his hat. "I suppose not."

"And it's not like anyone would want Sahasrahla." Her dappled grey gelding was about as undesirable as ridable horses went. He had come cheap from Temon, and it didn't take them long to realize why: the horse was dumb as a sack of hammers (turned out whoever had named him had done so with more than a hint of irony).

Link wiggled out of his cloak, setting it on a rusted hook near the door, and sat on the bed. Impa knelt before him, helping him remove his convoluted Sheikah gauntlets. When she pulled one off and kissed his fingers beneath, careful not to dislodge the bandages around his palm, his heart quickened a little. "Are we… is this sort of thing all right—I mean, on a mission?"

She moved to the other arm, unwrapping the strips of leather and cloth. His bracer was a stiff, ugly thing, but sturdy—Talporom had commissioned it in Old Riko to help Link hold his shield properly. "As long as we do what needs to be done. In the past, some elders have frowned on it, but others have encouraged it. You can say it helps solidify comradeship." She paused, fingers entwined with his. "As long as you don't prioritize me over our goals. But I know you won't. I trust you."

 _Oh gods, why did she have to say that?_ As she moved to help him out of his tunic, he couldn't stop a knot of guilt from forming in his gut. He knew he could count on her, wholly and completely, to keep him in her periphery when their mission dictated, but he could not trust himself to do the same. Impa could hide her emotions well, she could compartmentalize her feelings and goals according to changing circumstances, but Link knew if he had to choose between Impa or a scrap of metal, he wouldn't have to think about it for long.

"Do you think—do you think what the elder says is true?" he asked. "That this sword is something special?"

Impa frowned, bending to remove her shoes. "She wouldn't send us on a fool's errand out of spite. Nor would she do it if she didn't think we could succeed." She sighed, removing her padded shirt. "And though Talm has a point when she says any man can die from a sharp enough sword, I can't help believe the elder when she says we need an extraordinary blade to spill Dragmire blood. As far back as Ganond, no ruling Mandrag has ever died at the end of a weapon. They all went old and in bed, as far as I know. It makes sense, considering when they come of age they receive a piece of the gods' power. And Ganondorf even has the protection of a rova wife. That makes it… much worse."

Link reached out for her, ignoring the stinging of the tiny scars on his lips at the memory of the witch's spell. "Did she… Impa, did she ever do anything to you while you were…"

"I suppose I only spoke of this to the elder." Link couldn't blame her for not mentioning it. Conversations involving the rova usually disquieted him, and Impa wanted nothing more than for Link to recover in peace and comfort. "She came to me once. And even then I'm not sure what she did. She waved her arm and I was asleep, but even then a part of me knew to resist her. I've never had a nightmare like that before. I was worried she had done the same to you."

"She did, but…"

"But you don't dream," Impa finished for him. "And I'm only glad you could avoid that pain. Gods, it hurt… it was hard, but I tried to hide everything from her. When I dreamt I was going to Kakariko, I could feel her following me so I turned and went the wrong way. A few times I started to see a little girl, so I made her into myself, I made her into Talm, I did everything I could to keep Zelda from her. I tried not to dream of you, but I had little control at that point."

"Do you always dream like that? Knowing you're dreaming?"

"I'm supposed to. Every Sheikah child learns early on. It was something that didn't come easy to me, and I still fail to find control sometimes… but I still don't know what information the rova might've gleaned from my dreams. Probably none, since she didn't try the spell more than once. It was mostly Haema who came after that. But he got nothing, either. His crude methods were nothing compared to hers." She reached over to grip his belt. "He did tell me you talked, though. That we were going to assassinate the King and crown some noble Ordishwoman in his place. It was a good lie." She pushed herself to her knees and straddled him, hands working to remove what remained of his clothing. "Believable, probably what the King wanted to hear. He cannot reunite the country without Ordona, and if he has a reason to go there anyway—"

Link put his hands on hers and held them in place. "Can we not talk about this… at least not right now?"

"All right. What do you want to talk about?"

"I don't know… nothing."

She smiled and bent, waiting for his approval before laying her lips on his. "Nothing it is, then."

* * *

 _A knife. My knife. How trite._

Though Ganondorf trusted his dreams, he had to admit they certainly lacked symbolic originality. The imagery itself was unremarkable: the knife had simply slipped out of the sheath at his side and plunged of its own volition into his throat. The heart of the message had been clear, though its equivalent in the waking world was less than transparent. The stirrings of the Knights of Hylia in Ordona, the rebellions that sprang up in Silk and Onrago and Obra Garud like weeds, the little stableboy who had stolen his mount and caused an uproar in the Capital—these were the first three on a long list of knives that could easily turn on him should he let his iron grasp slip.

He had to admit, the juggling was beginning to annoy him. The unrest in the Desert Province and the emergence of the so-called _Galinedh-Ahnadib_ ("Even in death that woman vexes me," he'd confessed to Barudi, to which she'd only laughed), the High Prince of Ordona thinking himself too high to bend the knee, the vague threat of an ostensibly royal Ordishwoman, those Sheikah rats scurrying around the country and tearing holes in the fragile veil of his peace, and worst of all, the seemingly harmless stableboy they welcomed into their filthy nest. It was no wonder he was dreaming of knives. Too many duplicitous blades could turn on him while he slept.

But he was the King. He had the kind of power lesser men did not dare to dream of. He commanded the largest army since the Conqueror King's, had a loyal and stalwart general at his side, and the world's greatest sorceress for a Queen. He would not allow himself to be spread thin.

A few of these potential threats he could do nothing about. He had done all he could in the desert save for reinvading, and his governors and ambassadors had quelled rebellions and revolutions so far. He could order the arrest of every Sheikah in the nation and any Hylian seen with them, but he had little doubt the clan's masterminds remained hidden in those damnable eastern mountains, and the Minister of Eldin didn't answer to him. Renado sat smug and satisfied in his fortress in Eldoran, no doubt surrounded by his own pack of Sheikah guard dogs. Ganondorf would take care of him in time, as he would the rest of the province.

As to the problem of Ordona, well, there were plenty of squawking Ordish birds he could kill with one stone. The high screeches of the High Prince, the gloating Knights who flapped about the land with impunity, the mysterious hen hidden among the ranks of indistinguishable nobles—these were matters perfectly within his reach, perfectly aligned with the trajectory of unification. And with his bolstered army at his back and the second prince on his side (though the boy had done practically nothing so far but apologize for failing to convince his father to negotiate terms of annexation), he had a good idea of what he would do with Ordona.

The possibility of a living royal heir had intrigued Barudi to an almost absurd degree, though whether she was merely looking out for the stability of his claim to the throne, or if she viewed royal flesh and blood as a valuable material for spell-casting, he could not guess. While he was busy deciding if Link's claims were desperate lies told under duress (most likely), Barudi was already offering to find out in which House the lost princess might be hiding. He would've taken her up on that offer, if not for the requirement that he must deliver her thirty-seven loving fathers and hang them all on a new moon. Since she knew he would want to avoid murdering his own innocent subjects for the sake of what may be a lie, she offered him the next best spell, which only required forcibly removing the fingernails of the nearest butler. He couldn't deny her fully (he never could), so he told her she may cut the fingernails off the butler but not pull them out entirely. She had bowed her head with a dissatisfied frown, and the next time he'd seen the servant in question he had his nails cut so short they were bloodied at the ends. The butler, of course, said nothing about it. Barudi declared the incantation a partial success.

She said she did not see a face, she did not see a precise location, but she did see a pearl of blood, bluish and dark like the eternal river of the world, dripping its way southeast from the Capital. She had been disappointed with the imprecision of her spell, but Ganondorf was highly satisfied. He had conformation enough that such blood still existed, and knew in which general direction it pooled.

Barudi often troubled him for permission to gather the ingredients for her enchantments, and given their nature, he was glad she did. Truly, he wished to give her all she wanted, but he could not let her run amok cutting out soldiers' tongues and stealing the children of the palace slaves. The littler things she took for herself. Sometimes he'd wake up to her plucking hairs from his head, sometimes she'd pilfer and return items from his chambers, and every time she slipped from his bed, she would do so with one hand cupped under her. She never let him hold her when they were finished, even if he gripped her wrists and gently pinned her down, with a small incantation she would slide out from under him and retreat into the shadows, laughing like a schoolgirl. There was nothing he could do to make her stay, either through words or caresses or unserious displays of force; she said she had laid in her bed in the desert for far too long. The time for her to sleep was over.

In an attempt to keep her intrigued enough to lie beside him for a while, he told Barudi of his dream. She lifted her head from his naked shoulder and narrowed her eyes at him, curious smile spreading across her colored lips.

"Tell me, does it hurt when you touch the knife?" she asked.

"Not so much," he answered. "Though I feel a tingling in my palm." He had assumed it had been a side-effect of its forging, since no doubt some Goron fire magic had been hammered into the blade—fire magic whose sole purpose was to kill him.

"That is because, though it is pure Goronic steel, it is incomplete. Proximity to its other parts will bring out the true magic in it."

"Other parts?" Ganondorf had raised an incredulous eyebrow, but he had half-expected her explanation.

"You have told me you can read the runes carved in its side," she said. "The words come from an old Goronic legend about a very particular sword with very particular attributes, a sword that was responsible for ending the ancient wars in Hyrule's favor. For every ambitious Gerudo King seeking to steal the treasures of the land, always there was an equally determined Hyrulean to resist him, wielding a blade of enormous power."

"We do not speak of those stories anymore," Ganondorf said. "Not since Ganond, anyway. If they have not been forgotten completely, they have at least been misremembered."

"There are very few who remember." She leaned against him, breath almost cold against his neck. "It was probably a century ago, when I was still watching the world solely through the eyes of animals, that a priestess of Din came to the Colossus. The last living rova had just died and the rest of us had been wiped out or banished from this world, so those fools in Obra Garud finally thought they had rid the land of us. They thought our temple was forever empty, that our beautiful home would never see the shadow of another woman walk its halls. So while they were sealing our doors, the priestess placed a small piece of metal on our altar. It was a treasure she thought would only be safe behind an impassable wall in a temple no one would dare visit. She was right, of course. Until you came, not a soul disturbed that peaceful place."

"Why would a Gerudo priestess of Din have a piece of a sword from a Goronic legend?" Ganondorf asked.

"The legend is not merely Goronic. Long ago it pervaded the land, and every race had their own stories about the sword of evil's bane. Surely there are still a few places where it is told. Even some towns in the desert. After all, many Gerudo blamed it for the deaths of their Kings. Others saw it as a righteous tool of the gods. A servant of the triumvirate would no doubt consider a piece of the weapon valuable."

Ganondorf wondered why he had not noticed a scrap of metal atop an altar he had passed by on his way to the statue of the nameless goddess. Then it struck him—though the King was too smart to have a use for such dreck, there was certainly a stableboy who thought he did. "The Sheikah are no doubt among those who still speak of it."

"Likely. Though I have been asleep for so long, it is difficult for me to say who and where the old stories still live. But I will tell you this: if the boy gets the idea into his head to reforge the sword, it will come to naught. He does not and will never have all the pieces. You will never be cut by the true blade of evil's bane, I can guarantee it. I have _seen_ it."

"It is flattering that he might think he needs a sword of great power to challenge me," the King chuckled.

"He does. Your bloodline is strong, your will stronger."

"Yet I killed my own mother easily enough. She was as much a Dragmire as I am."

"A testament to your power, my love. You killed her when no one else could. Tell me, before you interfered, did you ever see her injured? Did you ever see her sick?"

Ganondorf thought back. She had ridden through legions of enemies during the Eldin War and returned with nary a scratch—and even when the occasional lucky hit bent her armor or split her skin, she never seemed to notice. Injuries that would kill a lesser woman did not even inconvenience her. "No."

"And she fell to your magic—and only a simple spell. Though she had the strength and fortitude to wield the great golden power as you do now, you are far greater than she could ever be. There is a reason, my love, that Gerudo boys born fully of their mother's lineage are revered. They are often born with magic that can put even a rova to shame." At Ganondorf's laugh, she lay a hand on his collarbone, tracing it back and forth. "You doubt yourself. But you are merely unlucky. You are a King who remained untaught in our ways until adulthood, and that is not how it should be. Kings should have rova; it has always been that way, back to the first son born of our people. Even Ganond's mothers were of my clan—and I taught them everything they knew when they were mere girls."

"You have taught me much as well," he said.

"And you have learned remarkably, for a grown man. Though you are fully Gerudo, like any woman, your magic differs from ours. But do not think you are at a disadvantage. You simply must draw your power from a different wellspring. After all," she smiled, hand crawling down his stomach, "you have your own materials to work with."

"Ah, but you seem to use them often for your own ends."

Barudi laughed. "Do not pretend I don't pleasure you equally in turn. If anything, I am fair. You so courteously woke me from my slumber, and I delivered Obra Garud to you. You give me materials, and I give you the fruits of my sorcery. You will cut out a stableboy's heart for me, and I will slit the little white throat of the woman who pretends to your throne."

"Let me find her first, Barudi. And let me do it without unnecessary bloodshed. Ordona will suffer enough in the coming weeks."

She lay a hand over his cheek, smiling. "You are too full of kindness."

"I am not kind. I am merely prudent. Only a fool tortures and destroys the people he rules."

"Indeed, my King." He smiled and tried to pull her closer to him, but she wriggled out of his grip. "You must arise," she said. "Your warhorse is being presented to you today."

"Ah, yes," he said. "This old ritual again." He had been through those particular motions several times before—at the dawn of the Eldin War, after his coronation, in preparation for his ride to the desert. He expected this would go much as the others had: the stableman and his responsible lackeys would bite their nails as Ganondorf rode an inevitably decent horse around the corral, voiced his approval, and sent the stablehands away to get appropriately sized armor forged for it.

As the King cleaned himself up, shaved his upper lip and made sure his cloak swayed unwrinkled down his back, he hoped that the horse presented to him would at least be on par with the last one he'd received. He doubted it.

The animal in question turned out to be a charger from the Taobab grasslands around Onrago—a gift from his newly-appointed ambassadors and full of that wild spirit that made horses from the area so desirable, but equally as difficult to master. He had half-expected another horse from Lonlon, after his forthright approval of Epona. But as he mounted the black beast and nudged him around the corral, he couldn't help but frown in surprised satisfaction. Though he did not respond as quickly or easily as Epona (that horse, Ganondorf swore, could read her rider's thoughts before they were even conceived), he matched her in size and strength, and surpassed her in aggression—or at least, that's what Gorman had told him.

When he pulled the animal to a hasty stop, he decided he might be willing to settle for second best warhorse in the land. "What do you call this creature?" he asked Gorman, who, like any servant in his presence, wrung his hands a little in agitation.

"Rebonack, sire."

"Odd name."

"I think his name was supposed to be Gerudo, but something got lost in translation."

Gerudo did not make much of a habit of naming their mounts. It was probably a descriptor, though it appeared so mistranslated he couldn't even guess what it had been. "It suffices. This is a superb horse." He dismounted, handing the reins back to Gorman. "I am surprised the stableman Talon is not here to present it to me."

"Sire… we don't rightly know where Talon went. Ever since, well… he was quite fond of Link, your majesty. He couldn't wrap his head around the kid's… well, treason."

"It was unexpected, I'll admit. But the day he deserted camp at Obra Garud was the day he wound the first loop of his noose."

"Aye, he did. Your majesty's word is law, and we're all bound to it. It's just that Talon had trouble believing… well, he will come around. And when he does, your majesty, all I ask is that you allow me to retake him as a stableman. He is a hard worker."

"I will consider it, master Gorman." Though it was, on the surface, a reasonable request, it was one he could not promise to fulfill. He did not know how many servants' lives Link had touched, how far his treasonous attitude might've spread. Though it was easy to assuage men with money and status (it had worked well enough on Viscen, who was now thoroughly enjoying his elevated position as captain of the city guard and colonel in the Hyrulean army), he could not guess if Talon would let his newfound wealth distract him from his own doubts. It was a problem he would have to leave to his subordinates. He had a war to attend to.

Weeks later, when the donned his armor, slid Wormtooth into its scabbard and rode from the Capital, Rebonack seemed to enjoy himself as much as anyone. Citizens threw roses at the feet of the magnificent horse, and he tossed his head proudly. On its caparison shone the golden crest of the royal family, at its side hung the broadsword the Conquer King had used to subdue Hyrule on his march, in a wormscale-studded sheath indicative of its name. On Ganondorf's right, Haema gracefully returned a salute from a line of bearded men on the side of the boulevard, and on his left, Barudi adjusted her golden pelisse and shifted in her large saddle (somewhere in its expansive pockets, a little sand fox nestled in a bed of enchanted cloth and bags of thaumaturgical powder). In his wake his new squire trotted, waving to a few women who called his name, not bothering to hide the proud simper on his young face.

Ganondorf pitied the kid. He knew nothing of war as of yet—he had been at his father's side in Ordona when the King left for the desert. Perhaps it was that inexperience that made Daroen express great hope that when his father saw the legions of the Hyrulean King, he would throw down his arms and welcome the protection of the Crown. The boy should know his own people enough to suspect it would end differently, but Ganondorf did not doubt his loyalty lay with his vows. After all, since the Ordish crown and the rule of its people would go to his elder brother Oerick, he had little use for his home country. Second sons rarely did.

Ganondorf was familiar with the unlucky state of younger siblings and forgotten cousins of the Great Houses. And he had no problems with adopting those rogue Ordishmen, if they proved worthwhile. After he took their country, disbanded the Knights of Hylia and assimilated the High Prince's army, he would have plenty of fierce young men at his command. And those noblemen unworthy of their family's inheritance would be chomping at the bit to prove they were worthy of something else. They would no doubt eagerly reignite the fire their ancestors started in Eldin so long ago if it secured them respect and power from their new King. Ganondorf certainly had power to spare.

He stopped himself before he planned too far ahead. As the gates of the city came into view, and the portcullis creaked open, celebratory cheers and well-wishes from loyal citizens echoing down the boulevard, he told himself to remain prudent (on the list of virtues his grandmother prized most, prudence was near the top—before punctuality, after compassion). The little Goronic knife sat at his waist, serving as a stark reminder that although he might have scraped by so far, though his golden birthright had accepted him as its wielder, though he might've lived through the Eldin War and prevented another with a successful regicide, though he might've won the desert, he had to remember, first and foremost, never to take victory for granted.

* * *

Link did not like the way the water and sun shone on the scars on Impa's back, highlighting each raised, lightened stripe like a declaration. But he had to be content that they were under the sun at all, that each time she awoke from her unpleasant dreams she did so in his arms, in the blue light of the breezy lakeshore.

Impa would only swim with him at his insistence. When they stopped and set up camp in the afternoon, horses roaming in the empty fields nearby, he would undress and jump into the clear water, twisting his body like the endless silver fish that circled him. Impa would follow, at least up to her knees, where she would bend and wait for one of the animals to swim near enough that she could snatch it out of the water. She didn't seem interested in fishing with the rod Link had picked up in a small village outside Ferryman's Way, though it would've been much easier. Content to test her own quickness, she struck at the shallow water while he floated and dove and resurfaced.

He found all sorts of treasures under the water. While the river near Kakariko wasn't too deep and always moved too fast for him to linger at its bottom, the bed of Lake Hylia was a topographical masterpiece. The lake itself was as big around as some of the larger Hill Provinces, and beneath its surface swayed forests of marine weeds, large-leafed and shining with minnows. Crumbling towers and walls of stone stood in the shifting sand, painted with bubbly mosses, no longer home to anyone but round-lipped fish (Impa had told him many of the structures had been watchtowers and lighthouses, abandoned as the land slowly eroded into the lake). Occasionally Link would make it to the bottom, ears popping with pressure, heart thumping audibly in his chest, and he would retrieve an interesting stone or necklace of shells. He showed these discoveries to Impa, and she told him they were remnants of Zora culture; when the aquatic people had left Hyrule, they'd done so in quite a hurry, so they were bound to have forgotten a few treasures.

"Do you think little Zee would like this?" he asked her, holding a small stone carving to the light. It was a simple fish, about the size of his thumb, with wide fins and bulging eyes.

"I think she would, but we can't waste space in our packs for trinkets," Impa had answered, picking out the tiny, infinite ribs from their dinner. "It's best to throw it back." He had waited until she wasn't looking to slip the little fish into Epona's saddlebag.

They took the road along the shore, past rustling oaks and rocky outcroppings, nodding at friendly-looking travelers and lingering out of sight when groups of soldiers clinked past. Sometimes the path climbed high above the lake, winding atop the cliffs jutting over the water, sometimes it merged completely with the sandy shores, sometimes it eased into meadows of swaying grasses, but as they moved further south, toward the little town of Greenwood, the forests thickened and more often than not Link couldn't see the water through the trees.

Impa said she had been to Greenwood once before, on a previous mission. The hamlet was quiet, especially since the Zora people had fled the nation—it was a place of little import in the heart of Hyrule, so it had not seen the trouble of war since Ganond's march. And even then, it was so small and inconsequential he probably didn't even bother to conquer it personally.

"What were you doing on your mission there?" Link asked. He nudged Epona beside her horse and ducked to avoid a low-hanging bundle of vines.

"Searching for the old royal family," she answered.

"Really?"

"Ever since I turned eighteen and was sent out on my first mission, that was my goal. For years, that's all Palo and I did. We'd chase rumors, trace family lines, all for nothing, until… you were there for our first success. Well, almost a success." She shook her head. "And with Zelda in Kakariko, I was worried I'd have nothing to do. Now I get to chase legends."

"Impa… do you really think… do you think I can wield a sword like that?"

She looked up at him from her saddle, eyes bright. "You've still got a long way to go. Now more than ever we have to practice," she said. "But you are something special. The elder knows it, I know it. Even the King knows it. That's why he wanted to keep you alive."

"He won't for much longer."

"No. He won't. Because he knows better than anyone you can turn his own power against him."

"The power of the gods," Link muttered, more to himself than Impa.

"Some say it is. Some say it's merely a potent magical artifact. Some don't know any better than to say it doesn't exist at all. I say as long as it kills him, we should use it. And if we can get it, and the sword, he won't be able to defeat us. Or… that's how the old stories apparently go."

"I haven't heard those old stories," he said.

"Neither have I. I'm just repeating what my father told me. Gods know where he heard them. Probably from my grandmother. He says she told him the strangest tales sometimes. And the stranger they were, the truer." Impa shook her head. "There are so many broken legends and half-remembered folktales in this land, it's impossible to know the truth from the lies. But I believe Elder Merel. If she says this particular tale is true, then I will gladly ride to the edges of the map to prove it."

Link smiled. He had to admit he was enjoying this trip more than the last. It was certainly better than the Capital, and though he'd been fascinated with the desert—even missed it to some degree—he very much liked riding through the quiet woods, with no sign of the King or his armies, no threat of a siege looming on the horizon, no overwhelming scents of perfumes and incense. For a city boy, he was finding himself more and more partial to nature. The miles of rustling quiet made him wonder if he wasn't Capital-bred after all, if the watery breezes and open skies were memories he carried in his blood, if by some chance before his parents had sold him to the Crown or abandoned him in the city, he had lived under the green canopies of the south, or even in the chilly shadows of the Eldine mountains. Maybe he had been born within miles of Kakariko, maybe sometime as a baby he'd been carried past the Old Riko playhouse in his mother's arms, past a visiting Sheikah physician leading his own young daughter by the hand. Maybe he and Impa had locked eyes, red to blue, before either of them had the capacity to remember.

But he would never know. If he had been sold, he might be able to dig up a receipt of purchase from somewhere in the palace records, but discounting some sort of miracle, he would never be certain where he came from. He supposed he would have to accept that while the Sheikah had the mountains of Eldin and the Gerudo the vast desert, he could not attach himself to an ancestral home. He would have to accept he would never trace a family tree the way the Dragmires did, or that Zelda might one day, when she could understand what it meant.

 _That's all right,_ he told himself, and he remembered what Nabru had said so long ago in the wintry Capital: _Birthrights and bloodlines don't mean shit. At least, not to me._

"Look over there." Impa's voice wrested him from his reverie and he followed her finger to a small pillar of smoke rising up from the trees. "The Greenwood river begins here. We can resupply at the town and then follow the river south."

The quaint wooden houses of Greenwood squatted by the river docks, shaded under moss-eaten trees. A few half-naked boys wandered the dirt pathways between them, laughing and swinging sticks at one another. It did not have the same rotting, fishy smell as Ferryman's Way, but the swaying boats and wooden bridges designated it very much a fishing village. It straddled the river that separated Faron from Lanayru (or so Impa had told him), and nobody had ever bothered to designate the province to which the town belonged. The place was perfectly ordinary, perfectly benign (Link loved it, he had to admit), but they only stayed there to rest in a soft bed before heading deeper into the river lands.

"The Greenwood River winds south until here," Impa told him one night, tracing the map by the light of their small fire. Somewhere in the darkness, the horses grazed, brushing their tails against the flies that buzzed densely through the wet forest air. "Then we reach Zora's Domain. There, the Greenwood converges with the Zora River and the whole thing goes all the way to the ocean. Or so I've heard. Boats can only travel on small portions of it—there are too many rapids and waterfalls and tunnels, getting to the ocean is impossible. The Zora can, though. Or, they could."

"So there's supposed to be a piece of that sword around here?" Link asked.

"Somewhere. But that doesn't help much. Since the last two shards have shown up in sacred places, it's not a bad idea to assume this one might be in a temple or shrine. The problem is, the Zora were a highly religious people. They've got hundreds of places of worship, most of them in their Domain. I've heard they even have a few at the bottom of Lake Hylia, though no one without gills has ever been to them." She sighed and tapped the map. "We'll start in the Domain. It's only about the size of Kakariko, and it's where the Zora kept their treasures and temples. But if we find nothing there, then…" she paused to smile, turning their dinner over in their small pan. "I shouldn't worry. We have you. You've got a knack for tricking animals to lead you into temples. So just find a fish and follow it."

He certainly would've liked to, but for days he failed to find a fish particularly eager to lead him where he wanted to go. As they headed south, winding along the river, he saw nothing but clear water and occasional foams of white rapids. No temples, no towns, no Zora and no friendly fish. When they reached what appeared to be the end of the river, he dismounted from Epona and grit his teeth in frustration. They had come to a clear pool—endlessly beautiful, surrounded by swaying trees and glinting with greenish light, but above the waters rose nothing but rocky, vine-covered cliffs. They towered over the pool, arching to the sky like the impregnable walls of the Capital. Link didn't know much about rivers, but he knew water could not flow up and over such an enormous rock face.

Impa dismounted beside him, crossing her arms and making her way to the water's edge.

"Did we go the wrong way?" Link asked her.

"No. I don't think so. It can't hurt to check the map but I'm almost certain we're still on the waters of the Greenwood proper. I don't remember the river diverging."

"Neither do I."

Impa cupped her chin. "Link, get the rope from the saddlebag."

"Are we going to climb the cliffs? We should take the horses around." At her look, he shrugged and retrieved the rope from Epona's flank. Impa removed her cloak and secured her harp to her back. When he handed her the end of the rope, she wound it around her waist and stepped into the water.

"We should be close," she said. "I know this river has some underground ducts. I'll see if there's a tunnel or a cave that might lead to the Domain. If not I'll come back and we can take the long way around."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?"

She waded up to her waist. "I've got my harp, and that's always good for a few air bubbles." She'd shown him that particular tune during their spring dip, and stayed underwater for so long Palo eventually jumped in to save her—and got a scolding for it. "But if something goes wrong, I'll have the rope. Pull me up if I tug twice." Link nodded, gripping the rope but wrapping it a few times around his arm just in case (he still didn't trust the strength of his right hand). "I'll see you in a bit." With that she dove into the water, long rope trailing behind her. He fed her slack, standing his ground on its rocky shore and preparing himself for any tugs.

He felt nothing. He spied a few bubbles rising to the surface, and knew she had played herself some air, but by his reckoning (and he admitted he may have counted a little faster in his head than reasonable), she should've reemerged by now. The water was clear and placid, the surface rippling only as a result of the rope bobbing. All seemed calm, but he admitted she could've easily gotten her foot stuck in some underwater crevice, could've hit her head on the ceiling of a cavern trying to rise for air…

He waited for as long as he could, then waited a little longer. He told himself to trust Impa, to trust her harp and her uncanny instincts, but he couldn't help but think of the small pool in the Colossus, the aching, freezing feeling of nothing but water all around him, the fear that his last breath might not be a breath at all but a lungful of water.

He grit his teeth and apologized. He knew she was likely unharmed, and would have a few choice words for him when he forced her back to the surface. And he would gladly endure her censure if it meant she had breath to deliver censure at all, so he planted his feet against the round rocks of the shore and pulled with all his might.

The rope pulled back. He cried out as his feet slid across the pebbles of the shore, but he held fast. Behind him, Epona started to fidget, throwing her head and snorting. He planted his heels and arced his back away from the water, but the rope burned against his fingers, tightening so forcefully around his forearm he thought it might rip it off completely. He strained against the pull, struggling like some parody of a fish at the end of a line. He knew he could reach up, draw his sword and cut himself free, but the thought of Impa on the other end kept him firmly secured to the rope as a hook in any fish's cheek. He just grit his teeth and pulled against it while the horses began to panic behind him.

His feet slid out from under him and he tumbled to the surface of the pool, and he barely managed to inhale one last breath. He hit the water with a spray of angry bubbles, and twisted himself upright, rope still wrapped around his arm. He opened his eyes and saw green shelves of rock, forests of healthy weeds, a school of harmless silver minnows—no monsters, no sign of Impa. The taut length of the rope shone almost white in the green light, sloping toward the submerged base of the cliffs. He held fast as it pulled him deeper into the chilly pool. With a sudden wave of freezing water, an undercurrent swept at his feet, pivoting him in the water like a wheel, and he spun breathlessly past mossy green rocks, tumbling and turning until he no longer knew which way was up. He gripped the rope, straining his eyes against the darkness, lungs burning, head reeling, until the last green glow of light disappeared from his vision and there was nothing around him but cold rushing water, sweeping him into darkness.


	70. The Great Ordish Misadventure Begins

"Ask any Hylian—or certainly any Ordishman—and he will tell you that the Gerudo culture only thrived by taking what belonged to others. When I brought this up with one of my Gerudo customers, she said that the races of Hyrule were always good at projecting onto others what they themselves had done for centuries—stolen treasures, artifacts, trade routes, scientific and mathematical ideas, literature, and even philosophy, from the people of the desert, all while claiming it as original. 'If they expect me to rob them right back, perhaps I will,' she laughed. 'Especially if they say such things about me.'"

Golo, Goron merchant

* * *

It did not surprise Nabru to hear she was dead. Anyone who had heard she had been stuck full of arrows like a pincushion at Obra Garud would've been unwise to assume otherwise. It was just as well. Martyrdom and resurrection garnered more support than mundane victories. It was a useful metaphor, one she liked very much—just like her matron god, she had shed her old mortal skin and its many injuries, and reared her head again in Silk, shouting the name of the _Galinedh-Ahnadib_ , fully reanimated and mad as hell.

She had piggybacked on that myth for the first few weeks of her budding fame, letting Galra and her brothers nurse the rumors that after Obra Garud had fallen, Ahnadib edh-Yadooran had sacrificed her own life to bring back her arrow-riddled bodyguard (Gerudo storytellers were also fond of role-reversals in the face of adversity; though Nabru had never bothered to learn to read, she had heard the bards and seen hundreds of plays performed from the backs of creaking caravans). Some people swore that the moment the wormsilk tycoon's head had fallen on the executioner's platform in Obra Garud, Nabru sprang from the foam of the Gerudo Valley River completely naked, scaled the cliffs and announced herself officially reborn by the will of Molgera. This story pleased her much more than reality, though most stories did.

It was becoming increasingly clear to Nabru the reputation made the hero and not the hero the reputation. But she was willing to float on the current of this idea. It was what had made her rise to become an influence in current Silk politics, it was what made dissatisfied Gerudo patriots flock to her from all corners of the pearly city, and it was what made these men before her, bound and bewildered, shake in their little Hylian boots at the sight of her.

She walked from one end of the row to the other, glowering down at them, winking evilly when the occasional man mustered the courage to meet her eyes. Behind her, her ragtag band of misfits waited, smiling behind layers of cloth. Nabru was the only one who did not bother to cover her face—there was no point. The others could move around undisguised under the watchful eye of the authorities in Silk, but there was little a face covering could do to hide Nabru's conspicuous stature. When she was not marauding, she was hiding.

She didn't get too many chances to unfurl her spine under the open sky, and she would not waste a chance like this, especially not after what Ahnadib had told her so many months ago in her prison beneath Obra Garud. _If they kill me, you'd better make those assholes pay for it_. And knowing Ahnadib, she meant pay in every sense of the word. Which is why, after her insurgents plucked the King's foremen from their cozy barracks at the site of the new bridge, she had ordered her women to take each of their purses.

"Well," she barked at the men before her. Each started at the sound of her voice, bound hands shaking. She didn't expect them to be defiant; they were, after all, carpenters and not fighters. "I'm sure you're wondering why I bothered to drag you all the way out here."

"T-to ransom us," a younger, braver man stuttered.

"Oh, little boy, I don't think you're worth enough for that," she laughed. "It's because I don't really want to kill you. I've been dead for a while now, and frankly it's been a disappointing experience." She couldn't suppress her grin when one of the men started trembling anew. She pointed, turning his attention to the north. The distant scaffolding stood tall and rickety against the rising sun, mapping out the skeleton of their project on the eastern edge of the valley. It was still in the preliminary wooden stages, which was ideal; she knew she would have a harder time breaking it once the metallurgists came and welded the steel bones of the thing in place. "You see, I could've let you go to work today on that rickety pile of sticks you dare to call a bridge. But I wanted you to get a good view of this from a safe distance." She pointed over the shining waters of the Gerudo River to the base of the distant bridge, where the wooden abutment met the red cliff. "You see, we've left a little surprise under there, courtesy of our bombcraft technician." She didn't credit the mastermind behind it—the queer old man they called Sheim seemed to want nothing more than to distance himself from this kind of ostentatious operation. He was, after all, truly Sheikah, working eternally unseen from the shadows. Fortunately his daughter had been a little more forthcoming, and had decided to accompany them as designated archer on this outing. Nabru quite liked her; she had a fierce smile and big brown eyes a woman could lose herself in—and Din's tits, they were sharp. It would be a shame to see her leave on her next assignment, but when the Sheikah elder said to jump, her subjects eagerly asked which cliff.

One of the carpenters cried out a little as Nabru nodded to Elpi. The Sheikah, dressed like a true Silk vagabond, drew her arrow and another woman lit the pitch at its end. She lifted her bow and released (she didn't even seem to take the time to aim), and a fiery arrow whizzed in a lovely arc over the rapid waters. Nabru's heart soared with it, until the bolt disappeared in a puff of smoke at the abutment's base.

The cliffside exploded in a shower of splintered wood and shattered rock. The blast tore the bridge's body into pieces, the scaffolding burst into flame and buckled, and a thick pillar of black smoke rose from the building site, curling into the clear sky. Nabru didn't flinch with the rest of them; the sight was something beautiful to her. One of the men fell to his knees, some lowered their heads impassively, others just stared, bewildered, as the fruit of their hard work soared flaming into the hungry tongue of the river.

It was beautiful, how it only took a few seconds for years of planning and months of labor to collapse into blasted ruin. It was no loss to Nabru, this symbol of unity between Hyrule and its newest province, the brainchild of the King's engineers, and the means for the Capital's greediest profiteers to exploit the resources of their neighbors. It made her heart sing to see the slivers of flaming wood, the billows of smoke, to hear the shouts of her prisoners' underlings driven from their beds by the explosion. She smiled, hoping that the destruction could be seen from both Silk to the south and its eponymous bridge to the north. It would only be right, since the bastards had mustered the gall to build their new steam engine road between the two.

"Stop weeping," Nabru told the men. "Just think of it as financial security. I've ensured you'll keep your employment for another few months—and then another few after that, when I blow up the next hideous thing you build. And the next."

She grinned at their bewildered faces. She knew she could play this game until Faron ran out of wood to supply the carpenters, until Eldin ran out of steel to send to the metallurgists, until the world ran out of energy to fuel the prototype steam engines that would no doubt come rumbling to the valley in the near future. This week, she would capture the welding foremen, next week the railway engineers, the next, the carpenters again, and never tire of seeing the fear on their faces. For every bridge they built, she could knock it down. She was a simple woman with simple pleasures.

"You are dismissed," she told them. The ones who had fallen pulled themselves to their feet, and like a line of frightened ducklings they waddled back toward their project, heads down, wrists still bound. "When you put the first nail back in your little bridge, remember the _Galinedh-Ahnadib_ ," she said, and as the last one slinked past her, she smacked his ass with the flat of her leather-sheathed spear. He jumped, stumbling to catch up to his compatriots, and Nabru flipped one of their purses in her hand, smiling at its pleasing weight. She leaned to the Sheikah beside her, never taking her eyes off the beautiful sight of a gaggle of robbed Hylian men running to put out the fires of their thoroughly ruined day.

"Not doing the Gerudo reputation any favors, are we?" she laughed.

Elpi shook her head. "Neither yours nor the Sheikah's." Nabru couldn't see her smile, but she could hear it in her voice. "But when I find myself doubting, I tell myself it is simply one way to get in touch with my heritage."

"Hah! Certainly a good way to think about it." She gripped Elpi's shoulder as she watched the carpenters' silhouettes shrink against the horizon. "Well, if I'm richer for it, I won't complain. We could certainly use this gold better than they can."

* * *

Palo had never come across a city he didn't hate. The Capital smelled of factory smoke adulterated only by the stink of human waste, Silk hovered so high above the Gerudo River Valley there was no telling when it would crack and tumble into the water, Riverton glittered with such assurance of its own beauty it almost made him gag. Though each had its own unique gamut of abhorrent qualities, his general dislike of cities was spurred mostly by the sheer crowding—of living, and dead. Obra Garud would've been fine with him since most Gerudo ghosts, by some quirk of culture, decided to haunt the wilderness rather than bother their relatives in the city, but he had little hope for that place now, since half of it was still rubble, and the other half was overrun by the King's sycophants.

Ordon City had its own unique flavor of deceased—if he had a rupee for every goddamn white-bearded old man in his family's armor that cried for vengeance, he'd buy himself a fantastic villa overlooking Lake Hylia and live out his peaceful retirement alone. They were everywhere—and their sons and wives and even a few particularly loyal hounds, sniffing and howling and pacing in circles for their masters' wandering grief. They were distinguishable only by the sigils of their houses—and perhaps the design of their armor—otherwise all Ordishmen looked the same to Palo. Here and there he would see a Greenthorn patriarch wandering with naked sword, swearing revenge on this or that member of House Elanor, whose ghost he didn't know lingered behind him that very moment, swearing revenge against the steward of House Ceyland. It was all they talked about—inheritance, revenge and honor, unaware that their houses may or may not still be at war. And Palo could not be bothered to explain it to them.

It was only worse now that the boots of the King's men were stomping so loudly across Lanayru he could almost hear them. Ghosts could smell the rising tide of war, they could tell when their numbers would grow. They would howl and wail and glimmer with excitement, they would push billows of cold air through hallways, knock a few candles from shelves or wake an innocent sleeper with a harrowing scream or two. Palo didn't know how they could smell blood on the horizon, he could only hope that when he inevitably met his end on the tip of one sword or another, his ghost wouldn't be so pathetically desperate for company.

"You're blinking too much," Talm said beside him. "See anything interesting?"

"Just some geezer Whitbridge with his cape on, looking for blood. He might've been a High Prince or something."

"Yeah? You should ask him to put in a good word for us when he haunts his grandsons. Get us into that palace of theirs so we don't have to sleep at the inn."

"Wouldn't that be nice? I'm not sure if the higher-ups around here would stoop to listen to a Sheikah deadseer. You, maybe. Not me."

Talm smiled and adjusted her feathered hat. On their way into town, she had stopped to bedeck herself in magic and creams of her own concoction, producing Ordish dress seemingly from nowhere and cloaking herself so swiftly and adeptly in her disguise Palo was sure in the span of him turning his head away and back again, some Ordishwoman had disposed of Talm and taken her place. She stood a few inches taller than she naturally did, her hair curled around her pale, heart-shaped face in a shining wreath of white-gold, her big eyes blinked a pale, soft blue. Gone were her tattoos, gone was any trace of the Sheikah from her face—the only way Palo could tell it was Talm underneath all that quintessential Hylian was the familiar mischievous glint in her eye.

"It's so we can get an inn," she told him.

"You don't think they'll rent a room to a couple of Sheikah?" he asked.

She shrugged. "You never know with Ordishmen. Besides, I've been waiting to try out my new eye color."

He humored her, for the time being. She put him in a hat and coat, lightened his skin and hid his tattoos (which unfortunately functioned perfectly well despite it) so they could at least be seen in public together, but he admittedly still looked less than ideally Hylian. He figured there was little he could do about his strong chin, or his nose (the elder once told him it was definitely his father's, chiseled and long and perfectly Sheikah). If anyone looked like the caricature of the stoic, hard-mouthed mountain warrior, it was Sheim. But Palo came in a close second.

When passersby sent glances his way, it was not entirely without suspicion—he could not carry a sword like Bloodletter without drawing a few looks—but Talm, when donning disguises, took great care to make them perfect, and perfectly beautiful. She was a staunch advocate of hiding in plain sight, and as the eyes of a dozen Ordishmen followed her down the sunlit boulevard, it was with nothing but admiration. Palo preferred not to have so many gazes locked on him, but he let Talm have her moment. It wasn't too often a Sheikah could safely bask in attention, and she thrived on it.

When he spied a small boy in an alleyway selling papers, he decided to take the opportunity to avoid the spotlight. "I'm gonna go harass that kid for news," he muttered to her, but she didn't seem to hear him. She had stopped to acknowledge a young Knight of Hylia who had shirked his patrol to talk with her. Palo wasn't surprised to learn they operated in the open—with the tacit support of the government (despite the meaningless, half-hearted condemnation from High Prince Oerick to keep the monarch of neighboring Hyrule happy), and the infinite adoration of the public at large, the Knights did not share the need for covert lairs or secret codes like their allies in the Capital. Instead, they touted their rhetoric and symbolism openly, marching to and fro in ostentatious freedom, clinking around in their silver armor and flowing white capes.

"Hey, mister," the paperboy said, drawing his attention away from the Knight. "Wanna buy one?"

 _Why do you think I'm talking to you?_ "Any news from the northern front?"

"Yessir, right here." Palo lingered in the alleyway to read the paper, skimming over the news that High Prince Oerick's best general, a patriarch of House Moonriver, was defending the border town of Brunton with equal valor and success. The High Prince himself, being in ill health, remained in Ordon City with his eldest, commanding from afar. All seemed well in the plains and forests to the north, which explained the general air of comfortable smugness about the city—or maybe the Ordish were always this self-satisfied.

"You got anything by the Knights?" Palo asked, knowing the rosy picture the official papers published was somewhere between a stone's throw and a few hundred miles from the truth.

"Who's asking?" the kid replied, narrowing his eyes and looking Palo up and down. "Oh, come on. I've got money, so gimme a damn paper." He wrestled a periodical from the child, shoving a few coins in his little white hands, and discovered an entirely different story, one he figured was closer to reality.

"Hey, it's extra for that one."

"Don't cheat me, you little shit."

At Palo's glare, the boy pouted and bounded to the other side of the alley, balancing his tower of papers in his trembling hands. Palo folded his own under his arm and stepped back into the street to rejoin Talm, who had finally shooed the Knight.

"So, did he ask for your hand yet?" Palo asked.

"He just spouted on about his duty to protect the citizens. Complained for a while about the Knights not being invited to the northern front. Then asked me why I was walking alone."

Palo glanced over the crowd, as the young man in question remounted his horse at the boulevard's end. Beneath the symbol of the Knights hung the insignia of House Elanor, the same inbred cesspool General Haema claimed to crawl from.

"So," Talm continued, "what news?"

"Well, the High Prince's press machine says things are going well up north. This might buy us enough time to search around here for any clues. Though since both the Oericks are here, there might be some security around the palace."

"Sounds manageable."

"But the Knights are telling a different story. They're saying Brunton will fall within a few days, the King will march on Ordon City, the Knights will be called to arms to help the official military defend it, and the whole country will be thrown into chaos within the week. They're only hoping the High Prince will have the gall to murder his own son when the time comes. They've also apparently hired an artist who's rather fond of copulation as metaphor."

"Wait, what?" Hunching his shoulder so no passersby could glimpse the illustration, he showed it to Talm. Her hand flew to her mouth.

"Oh my, that's…"

"Hilarious?" He looked again at the cartoonish depiction of the second prince on all fours, wearing a serious, determined scowl as a beast-like King thrusted at his hindquarters. _Father never loved me, so maybe he will_ , it read.

"I was going to say unintentionally arousing," Talm chuckled.

"Gods. Might as well burn this, then. I'll start a fire when we get to the inn."

"Well, don't be so _hasty_ …"

Their inn was in a questionable part of town—as the sun sank in the west and the lamplighters set to their duty, the city turned over and exposed its underbelly. Out crawled the gamblers, drinkers, fighters, debauched dandies in all their overdressed glory, women of the world's oldest profession whose crowns of voluminous feathers designated them rulers of the night—and, of course, their ghosts. The dead men-at-arms and Knights of Hylia shrank into the throngs of translucent beggars and wandering cutpurses, of tragic figures of bloodied courtesans and lost children, sliding in and out of the crowd, unseen and unheard by anyone except for Palo.

When they reached the inn, he came to terms with the certainty he would not get any sleep that night. At the elder's request, he had left his firegrass in Kakariko, so he would get no help when it came to quieting his own mind. She had been oddly insistent that he not distract himself. "I don't get distracted," he'd said, to which she replied, " _Impa_ doesn't get distracted, and your partnership with her has done you some good. But there is still one habit that sometimes tears you attention away from the important things." "Oh, _come_ _on_ , you're the one smoking with me." "True, but I do not smoke so much I sleep through entire _temokai_." He had to admit the elder did have a point, so he reluctantly left his stash with her (though some disobedient part of him packed his pipe in his saddlebag without entirely knowing it). He figured if the ghostly ruckus got too much for him he could go out and buy some more, but he of all people knew the Ordish varieties of firegrass were less than decent.

He sighed as he opened the inn's door for Talm. He tiredly ushered her inside and she, feigning flattery, waved her fan at him. He closed the oak plank behind him and shut out the noises of the night—at least the living ones. The innkeeper lazily asked if they were married and when they answered yes, waved them up to a room that smelled of boiled leeks and had a bed, Palo learned when he threw himself onto it, with only three legs. The whole thing tipped and creaked like an old boat and he tumbled to the floor, rolling to a stop at the leather toes of Talm's riding boots.

"It was too soft anyway," he muttered.

Talm ignored him, walking past him and lifting her gaze to a single, cracked window. She leaned on the sill and folded her white-gloved hands, laying her chin on them and sighing at the colorful lechery below. "Look how much fun they're having down there," she said.

"Good. They'll be too distracted to bother us." Palo pulled himself from the floor and brushed what he thought might have been sawdust off him. He made his way to the room's basin and started to wash the itchy creams and uncomfortable spells from his face. "Now get yourself ready. We've got a date with the palace archives."

"Already? We just got here."

"Yes, well, we don't know how long the city will stay standing. Plus, I doubt I'm going to sleep tonight anyway."

Her mischievous smile faded. "Ugh. It's been so long since I've had any real fun. I'm just _dying_ inside, Palo—though I don't expect you to care."

"Not really, no." He left the basin and lingered behind her, watching the chaos of color and life (and, of course, some death) below. Two drunk men stumbled around each other trying and failing to initiate a fight, a woman with a lute sat on a pile of boxes and sang to the crowds below in a terrible wail, ghosts weaved in and out of the scenery like panicked rushes of white water. "Damn, look at all those eager little dandies, all full of pent-up energy."

Talm gazed with loving frustration down at the crowds. "They're wonderful, aren't they? Ordishmen are all just so… pink."

"Pink?" When she didn't answer, he removed his overcoat and hat, opening his pack for his real clothes.

"Look, a woman brought out the wineskins—and ha! Look at those two pouring it all over each other! Someone's well-to-do father is going to be most displeased."

"Are you going to get dressed or not?"

"I am dressed."

He looked up and down her lacy tunic and riding pants. "You want to sneak around in that?"

"There aren't too many places to run in a palace. A pretty Ordishwoman like me can talk us out of anything if we get caught. Beauty pays, Palo."

"Not as much as skill," he replied, but he couldn't say he disbelieved her. She had already made a few friends on their way to the inn, even members of a brotherhood that would not condescend to even look at her if they knew she was Sheikah. So he let her have her way, knowing she could use her disguise as a shield if needed. He would just have to stick to the shadows—easy enough—then he wouldn't be scratching at his makeup all the damn time.

When they left the inn, he through the back window and she through the lobby, he found the citizens of the night too distracted with their own business to notice them slip by. Of course, there would probably be a Knight or two on patrol, looking after the citizenry while the High Prince's soldiers were exchanging blows with the Hyrulean army, but they were nowhere to be seen—they were probably busied with breaking up gambling circles and making sure no one showed too much skin in public.

It wasn't difficult to slip along the bustling shadows of the city. Even Talm, in her Ordish dress and clicking riding boots, crept behind him with ease, and they soon found themselves at the ornate walls of the Whitbridge palace. Palo took a moment to regard the loops of gold in the marble, looking for handholds and footholds and mapping an ascension path. The shadows of the guards on the top of the wall moved slowly back and forth, predictably sauntering from rampart to rampart, leaving quite usable gaps in their paths. Compared to the castle in the Capital, the Whitbridge abode was almost disappointingly unguarded.

When he and Talm eased themselves over the top of the wall, she took a moment to reassemble her hair. "A lot of effort just to get our paws on a few books," she whispered.

"Well, you know how it is down here," he replied, eyeing a guard on the opposite wall. "Don't let anyone but your relatives near your precious libraries."

"I could pass as some Whitbridge's cousin, I bet," Talm said.

"Trust me, this is easier."

At the sound of an approaching guard, they slipped down the wall and made their way in silence across the palace gardens. Palo considered the possibility of the library itself being under guard, since the historians of the Great Houses liked to keep their secrets safe. After all, knowledge was power, and with all the Houses clambering for it at once, there was only so much power one could spare to reveal. The rule applied doubly to the Whitbridges, being the house of the High Prince (for now, at least—who knew which family would wrest that position from them in the next few decades).

Given their race and standing, the elder had warned them of the difficulties of obtaining the information they needed. But she still suggested they start with the High Prince's library in the city, since it was supposedly the largest collection of knowledge in Ordona. Sheim had visited it once or twice (in secret, of course) while he was in the city conducting the longest assassination in their people's history. As Palo traversed the grounds, he couldn't help but glance at the balconies overhead and wonder which one Sheim's target had thrown himself from. The victim had died such that he left no trace nor suggestion that it had been an assassination—Palo couldn't remember exactly why that particular individual had to go, just that it had been during the early signs of the Eldin War. He wished he could've been there to watch the process of that duke (was it a duke, or an earl?) of Moonriver slowly succumbing to Sheim's trickery. He wished more so that Sheim was the one with him now, instead of Talm, but he was busy in Silk juggling an entire rebellion, or so the letters said. It was a job the elder would wisely trust to no one else.

So Palo was stuck here, neck-deep in a sea of vengeful ghosts and self-righteous Knights, with a woman whom he knew would rather be out partying with the rest of the rabble than doing her duty.

In the garden, he circumvented a gaggle of guards and slipped past a chapel of Hylia, to whom every House, great or small, had to pay tribute to be thought of as civilized, much less properly Ordish. Beyond the chapel's large, clear windows stood another courtyard, and beyond that, the library. As expected, its walls were solid stone, devoid of large windows or doors, and it took them a few minutes scurrying through the shrubberies like hungry animals to find a pair of small casements, cracked open only slightly to let in the summer breezes. There was no sign of candles or lamplight beyond the glass, and Palo creaked it open to stick his head inside. When he saw the only occupants of the library were a few translucent specters floating silently between shelves, he pulled himself through.

It was well past midnight and the library was mercifully quiet. The darkness was thick and lovely, easy to move in, but impossible to read in, so Palo struck a match and lit a few candles sitting on the polished oak tables. The light was weak, dim, but enough that they could both see the monstrous shelves that stretched almost to the ceiling.

"Wow," Talm breathed. "Look at all of them. Where do we start?"

The rows and rows of books put even the elder's library to shame (though he figured that spurred by some covetous mood Sheim had stolen a few tomes here and there for his tribe's collection). "Well, we know one thing: the sword is likely somewhere in the southern forests. So maybe we should start with an atlas or two."

"Ugh, why couldn't the elder have given us the one in Zora's Domain? That place can't be that big." She strode along the shelves, running her hand along the leather spines. "Or even the Lostwood. Something a little more precise than 'the southern forests.'"

"We're stuck with what we've got."

"This is going to take _forever_."

"What can I say, Talm? You know most missions are boring as hell."

This one was proving to be no exception. About an hour into their search, Talm had come up with nothing, and Palo had only found an old map detailing pilgrimage routes taken in the southernmost regions from temple to temple, back in the days before the Conquest War (which he promptly tore out and folded into his breast pocket).

The sections in the library were arranged in a fashion that made no sense to him, and the ghostly bookworms were so disconnected from the living they did not take their noses out of the tomes to even notice him. So he gave up on finding a dead librarian and sent Talm to the shelves under the shining lengths of decorative weaponry and other military treasures, in the hopes she could find something about the sword of evil's bane. But the best she had come up with were some illustrations and histories of some very impressive but impractically ornate halberds, and a story of a sword which had sliced up a fairy queen into twenty-three identical pieces.

They took great care to replace every book, to blow out every candle they used, and hide all evidence of their presence. He had to admit it made research rather difficult, but was thankful he took the precautions when after a few hours of searching, he heard the library's huge oak door rattle. He blew out his candle and pricked up his ears, signaling for Talm to do the same. The lock clicked, and with a quiet squeak the door opened. Light flooded in from the hallway, and a servant boy entered with a square of folded fabric under his arm and a torch in hand. The young man wore an almost nervous look as he walked around the library, weaving between shelves (Palo and Talm, of course, made sure to avoid the torchlight that followed him). He circumambulated the room a few times, and finding himself alone, shook out his cloth and laid it over one of the oak tables. Palo signaled to Talm, and as the servant again wandered about the room, they crept to the safety of the white cloth. Underneath the table, among the discarded pens and crumpled papers, they watched the servant boy do his chores. He tidied a little, dusted a few shelves, lay his torch in a sconce on the wall, but he seemed to be lingering rather than working.

The door opened once more, and the servant boy started at the noise. Nervously, he bowed his head as another man strode in, longhaired and sporting a noble, whitish-blond beard. "Good evening, my prince," the servant muttered.

"How are we faring?" the man asked. His voice was smooth, quiet. He looked and sounded too young, and far too healthy, to be the High Prince, so Palo could only assume this was first prince Oerick. After all, it sure as hell couldn't be Daroen.

"I am in fine fettle, my lord," the servant said. "I have everything ready."

Without another word, the young man beckoned the first prince to his side, and as they approached the table under which he and Talm hid ( _Of course,_ Palo couldn't help thinking, _of course, just my luck, dammit_ ), he could tell by their proximity their business was not exactly formal.

"My lord," said the young man, "I am happy to be of service, but—"a creaking of wood above them as the prince sat the servant on the table—"I thought I smelled a candle blown out."

"Don't make excuses," the prince said. "Entrance to the library is expressly forbidden after hours. No one would dare."

"As you say, sire."

As the bodies on the table shifted overhead, Palo shot Talm a poisonous look. She stared back, blue eyes wide, mischievous smile on her face, as if this affair was a fun distraction rather than a dangerous inconvenience. _Let's see a pretty Ordishwoman talk her way out of this one,_ he said to himself, but just mouthed at her to keep quiet.

"I don't ask much of you," breathed the prince. The wood creaked, and the servant gasped. "Forgive me. It is never as painless as we'd like."

 _Well, this whole adventure has taken a turn for the odd_ , Palo thought. _And the very, very un-Ordish._ He was fairly sure that whatever business the prince and his servant were conducting up there, Ordona had at least a dozen laws against it.

The boy on the table cried out a little, and the prince apologized again. "I assure you this is necessary," he said quietly.

Palo wished, just a little, to die. But he supposed he'd have to figure out a better way to rid himself of the situation. He looked at the debris cluttered at his feet, and picked up a wooden pen that had long since dried, lifting the edge of the cloth enough to see out but not enough to disturb the occupants of the table.

More eager than ever to conclude the night's activities, he flicked his wrist and tossed the pen between the rows of shelves opposite their escape route, where it clattered to a halt. The sudden silence above him told him the pair had frozen at the noise.

"Who's there?" Oerick shouted, scrambling from the table to the sound. Palo and Talm quickly wove a spell of silence to cover the pattering of their feet, and rolled from under the table, dashing for the window. The first prince had retreated into the darkness of the shelves, and the servant boy, shirtless on his thick tablecloth, stared after him, unaware of the Sheikah that moved behind him.

Palo mouthed a few incantations as he ran, letting the shadows carry his feet silently to safety. Not bothering to glance over his shoulder to see if they had finally been noticed, he just clambered through the window, Talm in tow. He landed in the soft grass of the courtyard, and with a few shadow arts and gleefully panicked sprinting, they reached the outer wall undetected (as far as he knew).

He could only breathe again when they had safely scaled the wall and slipped to the other side. He shook his head as Talm released the sigh that had built up inside her. "Did they follow us?"

"I don't think so. Though they'll be on high alert from now on." Palo chuckled and folded his hands behind his head. "Well, I learned more about First Prince Oerick of Ordona tonight than I ever would've liked to know."

"It was certainly an informative trip, though not in the way we intended." Talm started off in the direction of their inn, tucking her hair behind her ears and straightening her collar. "But, if we sneak back there with a pictograph box—"

"You think we can blackmail him into showing us through his library? You think he wouldn't have us arrested and executed on the spot? We've got no friends here in Ordona who'll publish that dirt, and it won't take his men long to figure that out."

"You've got a point. I suppose we'll just have to try again tomorrow?"

"He might be on the lookout for pen-throwers by then. I don't know, Talm, I got a pretty good map of the south, but besides that I found nothing. You know, if we want to get our hands on a legendary weapon, we've got to find legends of weaponry, and the best place to do that would be in the Knights' library in Relta." He sighed. "I know Merel told us to keep our distance from them, but I bet they've got the most extensive histories of combat. You'd think they'd be especially keen on a sword that's said to be blessed by their matron goddess."

"Well, then we sneak into the Knights' library with the pictograph box—"

"Your idea of espionage is a little crude, Talm," he laughed. "What we need to do is take advantage of their knowledge while avoiding them entirely."

Talm stroked her chin. "Maybe if we slip them some info about little Zee—after all, the Ordish were the ones who came up with all that nonsense about the old royal family sharing the blood of Hylia…"

"That's the worst idea I've ever heard," Palo growled. The one thing Merel had forbidden them to speak of, under any circumstance, was Zelda. If any non-Sheikah got any word of her existence, that only increased the likelihood that the King would find out as well. And that was the last thing they needed.

"All right, all right," Talm sighed. "Well, we might have more luck if someone wore his Ordish disguise instead of sneaking around like a Sheikah rat, as they say."

Palo laughed. "Your arts are incredible, Talm, but even with your help I can barely pass as Hylian, much less Ordish. And you're just a woman. The Knights would throw you out the minute you knocked on their door. 'Milady,'" he started in his best posh accent, "'do excuse me, with the _utmost_ respect, but it is not proper for a woman to be outside her house, much less in trousers! Go back and get yourself pregnant, and leave the weaponry to us, sweet maiden, for there are brigands about—'"

"Oh, _stop it!_ "

It may have been Talm's choked laughter, or it may have been Palo's disregard for common sense in favor of imitation, but when he heard the shout to halt behind him, it was close enough that he barely had time to turn before a gauntleted fist came soaring at his face. He twisted his body, scolding himself for his negligence, and accepted if this young man (for he had the big eyes and smooth face of a boy no older than twenty) had followed him from the Whitbridge palace, he might just have to slit his throat and skip town. He drew his knife as the man—dressed, of course, in the light uniform of a noncombatant Knight—thrust an elbow into his ribs, and in a tumble of arm locks and knife swipes and missed punches, he and his attacker stumbled across the alley. Talm rushed after them, calling out, but the man shoved Palo against a brick wall, certain of his victory. It was with a tiny gasp of surprise that he noticed the glint of a Sheikah knife at his throat.

"Well," Palo smiled, "This is awkward."


	71. A Strange Face

"The laws, stories and poetry of the Zora are often kept on bands of parchment made from a very peculiar seaweed. Laying the delicate paper on a flat slab, a Zora scribe presses the sharpened tip of a rock or shell into the seaweed, and marks appear as if by magic. In reality the pressure from the utensil breaks tiny fibers in the seaweed's body, which then bleeds a dark, viscous pigment. No one knows how old this technique is, or who first discovered it, but it seems to be the only way, short of carving into stone, that the written word can survive underwater."

Lady Ronia of the House of Faron, _Evolution of the Written Word_

* * *

The world smelled unbearably of fish. It was a cold, pungent stink, and it crept up Link's nostrils, down his throat, all the way into his lungs, wet and devoid of air—

Something slimy touched his face. He twitched and gagged, and a spasm of pain rippled through his lungs. When he opened his mouth to cough, his breath emerged as spurts of water. He gagged for a moment, clenching his fists, but when he finally expelled the last drops of water from his lungs, sucking in the dry, fish-scented air, he opened his eyes.

A face hovered above him, bluish-grey and far too close. A tiny speck of silver light glinted in each of the face's black eyes, and two vertical, translucent lids blinked over them. Link coughed and sputtered, kicking up sand as he struggled to his knees. He opened his mouth and closed it again, words still choked in his watery throat.

The creature watched him impassively. A slight inhuman frown separated blue lips, a pair of thin, amphibian nostrils flared. Link's eyes followed the face down a spotted, gilled neck to a naked chest, smooth and whitish, devoid completely of any human characteristics other than its basic shape.

"You have no gills," the Zora said. "So why act like you do?" The tone was not unkind (or at least, as far as Link could tell, since it emerged from the Zora's throat with a wet, gurgling timbre unlike anything he'd heard before).

Link looked around him, suddenly remembering why his lack of gills mattered in the first place. Some distance away Impa lay on her side, sputtering. He scrambled toward her, sand clinging to his wet knees, still hacking, trying to spit out her name. She lifted her head, and equally as breathless, pointed to the Zora behind him.

"I—" he coughed several times before he could spit out the second word, "know." He reached Impa and gripped her wrist, pulling her to a sitting position and holding her upright, and once they had both coughed and hacked themselves back into shape, they turned their eyes to the bewildered Zora lingering a few strides away.

Neither of them were quite sure how to begin. They hesitated, eyes moving from the creature to the glimmering pool beside it, empty round abodes shining in the setting sun. Vines clung thickly to the cliffs around them, and on the other side of the pond a bright waterfall sprayed mist across the rippling water. The Zora seemed perfectly natural and at home in the Domain—but he also appeared to be the only one.

The Zora pursed its lips (maybe—it was hard to read the subtle motion of its too-smooth skin), and saved them the trouble of starting. "Hello," it said, rising to its full height, thin body gleaming in the blue light. "I'm Ralis."

"I'm…" Impa coughed once more. "I'm Impa, this is Link. We're…"

"Poor swimmers," the Zora finished, and its weird mouth opened in what could've been interpreted (generously) as a smile. "Not smart of you to dive where the undercurrents can get you. And it was such a quiet day too, until two finless people spouted from the mouth of the tunnel. I took care to pick up the parts of you that fell off."

Link looked to Impa, then back at Ralis, who gestured to a small pile next to the water—a rope, a harp, a green hat and a couple other effects. "Th-thanks," Link said, pulling himself from the sand and wobbling toward it.

"What… why are you here?" Impa asked the Zora, as Link retrieved and wrung out his hat.

"Asking a Zora why he's in Zora River." It let out something similar to a chuckle. "I'm here because I'm curious. I've heard the stories, but never _seen_ them. So here I came."

"So… you weren't left behind or anything?" Impa ventured.

"Eesh," Ralis lifted a webbed hand to its (or perhaps, Link guessed, his) forehead. "We don't leave members of any school behind. Every egg accounted for. My people are mectilious, fastidual, or however you say it, attentive, proper—so you won't tell anyone I'm here, will you? I'm breaking every rule in the seaweed scroll right now and if anyone finds out, then…" The fish grimaced (maybe).

"No, of course not," Impa rose to her feet. "Not that there's anyone to tell. No one has seen your kind for decades. We didn't know if you were even alive or not. We thought you had all left."

"I don't see why we did," he said. "It's peaceful here."

"You mean you don't know?"

"Know what?"

"There was a war here, well… not _here_ , but in the kingdom. Your people left because they thought they would be the next to die in it. After the Gorons were exterminated—"

"The who?"

"The… Gorons…" Impa's frown widened and she absentmindedly gripped her harp when Link handed it to her. "How much do you know?"

"Less than I'd like to," he answered. "That's why I'm here. I've heard the stories the elderfish tell to the hatchlings about a place called Lanayru and the people we used to share it with. They said you dry land types used to spear us for fun and that's why we left, they also said the place dried up completely. Another said the food migrated downstream and we followed." He crossed his long, skinny arms and tapped his finned foot. "No one said we left because we were afraid."

"Ralis—"

"We're always afraid, aren't we?" he muttered to himself. "Never allowed to swim out to sea, never allowed to swim up the river—how am I supposed to learn anything that way?"

"Hey, Ralis, where are your people now? How many are there?"

"You can't hog all the questions!" the Zora said. He glanced up to the reddening sky, and then back down at the water. "How about this? It's getting late. I'll fetch us some supper and we can take turns to speak, all right?"

Link gathered wood and piled it high while Impa coaxed enough heat from her harp strings to light them. Ralis returned from the depths of the pool with three horribly stinking fish in hand (which proved to be unpredictably decent, once cooked), and as the sun crawled behind the grey walls of the Domain, Impa and the Zora started the duel of questions. Each tried to thrust in extra queries and parry the other's, so as Link nibbled at his reekfish in silence, Impa's meal cooled uneaten and Ralis' sat limp and raw in his hands.

They learned the Zora had made a new home for themselves in a calm inlet somewhere to the north of the Zora River delta, a three day swim from the mouth of the river, according to Ralis ("Though it is not far, you must be cautious of the giant eels," he added). The Zora had no trouble living in saltwater, they had no contact with people, so they had no reason to return to their ancestral waters, or to even talk about them. Those days were over, and they had their new home to care for.

When Ralis found a few seaweed scrolls illustrating the long-lost land of Lanayru in his mother's collection, he tucked them in his whale-skin pouch and set off south. He made his way upriver until he arrived at the Domain, where he found a treasure trove of his ancestor's artifacts, architecture and knowledge. Not many Zora still believed in the old water gods, but before their race fell into relative atheism, before they left their homeland, they had maintained a highly intricate network of temples, shrines and sanctuaries at the bed of the Domain.

"I've been here for a few days and I've already explored most of our old temples," he said. "According to one of the scrolls I found, some tunnels run all the way to Lake Hylia, wherever that is."

"That's _miles_ upstream," Impa said. "Those must be some long passageways to reach so far."

"Oh, yes, there are halls and halls and halls of just _amazing_ stone down there. It's a labyrinth—it's just wonderful." Ralis finally took his first bite of reekfish and grinned. "You probably want to see it." Bits of fish fell from his overstuffed mouth as he spoke. "They all have air pockets, so even you can explore them. You're looking for—what was it you were looking for again?"

"A sword. Well… pieces of one."

He swallowed. "Odd. Well, if like you said it'll be in a temple, you've arrived at the ideal place. Though I haven't come across anything that resembles a… it looks like that, correct?" He pointed to Link's sheathed weapon, lying across his shield by the fire. "With metal, not fishbone or teeth. I haven't seen anything like that. Whole or broken. Although," he took another bite, "there is one temple I can't get inside. The entrance is sealed off."

"Why?" Impa asked.

"Well, the seaweed I've found in the other temples said it's filled with some of our more precious things. Statues, scrolls, our people's waterclock, maybe some family valuables. I swam around it and I didn't notice a way inside. But I _did_ notice that." He nodded to Impa's lyre.

"You know what this is?" Impa appeared rather pleased.

"It's a lyre, of course. We have them, and lutes, and guitars, but ours can only play properly underwater. And they can't start fires." He finished his fish in one nauseating slurp, bones and all. "But yours is what they call… magic, correct?" Impa nodded. "Then here is our deal: I lead you down to the temple and if you can magic it open for me, we can look for your sword."

"Sounds fine, but how will you get us down there?"

"I will think of something. If you don't think you can hold your breath for long—eesh, no swim bladders either." He rubbed the back of his head and lifted his weird, black eyes to them. "Correct?"

Link nodded.

"Then we will test my genius tomorrow," he said. "For now, I'll try to rest. I'm too… giddy-giddy, if that's how it is said."

"Close enough."

"Keep the fins damp until the morning, friends." The Zora retreated from the light of the fire and slipped back into the pool without another word.

Link stared after him in silence as Impa finally took a bite of her reekfish. She chewed it for a thoughtful moment before reaching up to pull a thin bone from between her teeth. The light of the fire dimmed, and a full moon edged its bald head over the eastern cliffs.

"He's a little odd," Link offered, after the ripples where Ralis had submerged faded to the edges of the pool.

"Maybe not for a Zora. My father told me they could be… eccentric. I'm just glad after all those years away from Lanayru they haven't forgotten their Hylian. Though since their native language can only be spoken underwater, it makes sense they'd keep one to use on the surface." She finished her fish and threw its remains to the edge of the water, wiping her hands on her pants. "It's curious, though. How ignorant he is of all of this. Of people, especially."

"Oh, you mean his questions?"

"Yeah. 'Do you raise your young alone or in groups? How big do you typically grow? How long do you live? Are you two mates? Which one lays the eggs?' I thought he'd ask… better ones."

Link laughed. "I think those ones are fine. Did you want him to ask about the war? About battles and provinces and royalty?" Impa frowned. Even when she'd tried to explain to the Zora the significance of the piece of metal they sought, about the importance of reforging it, he had just shrugged with a smile and admitted he loved fixing things, too.

"I understand these matters wouldn't really concern him," Impa said. "But if he goes back and tells his people the war is over, they might come back. Ralis said they sealed off the entrance to their most sacred temple. If they kept their treasures safe, that might mean they intended to come back to reclaim them someday. Hyrule will have at least one of its lost races restored to it."

"But the war _isn't_ over," Link said. Just uttering the words aloud sent a jolt of emotion through him: anxiety, sadness, determination—an inextricable mess of contradictory sensations as quick to leave as they were to come. "We can't promise the Zora peace. Not until… well, until we win or the King does."

"And he won't." Impa gripped his hand, intertwining her fingers with his. "We will reforge the sword and bring him down."

"But gods above, a sword shard seems like such a small thing to find in such a big world."

"I don't like seeing you doubt like this. You've already found two pieces. Clearly some force of fate wants you to find the others. We _will_ find them. And if for some reason Palo and Talm fail to find theirs, we will go over there and make them. Someone has to keep those reprobates in line."

Link smiled. He had to admit he missed the pair already. Though he wouldn't have the kind of privacy he did with Impa out in the woods, where they could be as loud and bare as they wanted, he did miss Talm's wide smile and Palo's deadpan jokes—hell, he missed Irma and Talporom and the elder, and Zelda, especially Zelda, who had taken a special liking to him and Epona—

"Hey, Impa, what are we going to do about the horses?"

"I was just thinking about that. Knowing Epona, she'd be waiting for us exactly where we left her. I'm sure they're both fine. We could ask Ralis to swim upriver and check on them… but then we'd have to describe what a horse is to him. We'd tell him it has a tail and four legs and he'd demand to know its mating habits and social structure."

Link laughed. He looked back over the water, at the moon's reflection, and felt himself relaxing, as if a weight were evaporating from him. He leaned over and lay his lips painlessly on Impa's cheek, and she lingered to kiss him a moment before grasping his hands and pulling them gently out of the sand. "Where do you want to sleep tonight?" she asked. "There are a few buildings above water but I doubt any of them will be comfortable."

"Choose one, I'll follow you. I want to wash the reekfish off me first."

Impa smiled. "It'll do you no good." He shrugged and she humored him, walking across the sand and disappearing under the canopy of fan-leaved branches and arches of clean stone. In the clear, motionless night, the shining edges of the intricate architecture jutted from the water, reflecting the light as if every building were its own moon, chopped into crescents and ribbons. Even from under the water the panes and arcs of the buildings emitted an uncanny light, and as he took off his clothes and stepped to its glowing surface, he suddenly felt a little too illuminated.

Still, he draped his shirt and trousers over an encroaching tree branch and slipped into the water. With Ralis sleeping in its depths and the reekfish swimming happily at its opposite end, the pool smelled fresh. A few wet flowers floated by his head, glowing pink in the bright moonlight, and he sank into the cool water with a sigh of contentment.

He splashed for a while, until he spied something bobbing to the surface a few dozen paces away, at the center of the pool. Its shadow curled against the arched grey cliffs, and Link could make out a long torso, too-human limbs, the puff of a translucent fin as it broke the surface.

"Ralis?" he called, and the Zora didn't move, just floated silently. Link narrowed his eyes, reminding himself with a wave of anxiety that fish bobbed motionless to the surface for only one reason. He looked the Zora over for a moment, trying to make out any movement in his chest before realizing the bastard had gills anyway. So he splashed toward him, spitting his name a few times before the Zora raised his head.

Large black eyes met Link's and the Zora readjusted himself upright, something of a confused look crossing his face. "Yes?"

"I thought you were… um… you were floating," Link answered. "You weren't moving."

"Eesh, you thought I was dead?" The Zora threw back his head and released a horrifying gurgle that may have counted as a laugh. "I was just asleep. When Zora die we float belly-up like any self-respecting fish. Don't worry about me, but you! Where did your other skin go? Does it hurt?"

Link looked down at himself, stripped of everything but the barest of minimums. "Um, they're over there, but they're not my skin. They're my clothes."

"Your what?"

"I wear them like you wear your pouch. You know. Sometimes to carry things." As he turned in the water, he could feel Ralis' curious eyes on him—the Zora submerged once more and floated beneath him to get a better view of his finless feet and kicking legs, surfacing only to comment on their strangeness. Link paddled back to shore, and when he dragged himself from the water, made straight for his clothes. Ralis stared at him while he pulled on his trousers, raising a long-fingered hand to his chin in thought.

"You got bit, didn't you?"

"What?" Link frowned, and looked over himself for any new injuries, any new teeth marks or welts from water-dwelling predators. He saw only his scars, which he realized to a Zora might appear comparable to the long scratches of claws, or the scrapings of teeth from an unsuccessful devouring.

"The marks on you—you were bitten by something strange."

Link couldn't help the cynical half-smile. "Yeah. I was."

"But you swam away. You escaped."

"I guess I did."

Ralis seemed pleased. He stepped back into the water, his odd, translucent lids narrowing sideways over the impenetrable black of his eyes. "To swim away from a bite that bad, it's an impressive thing." He rested on his back in the water as Link pulled on his shirt. "You should have no fear about tomorrow. You're strong, you'll be fine, so sleep. I have a plan."

* * *

Ralis' plan, Link learned the next day, was to unfurl the length of his watertight whale-skin pouch and display it to them. Link stared at the veiny, semitransparent square of stretched skin and felt a little sick, but the Zora seemed nothing but excited.

"Since some idiot god decided to make you without gills _or_ swim bladders, I had to improvise. I took the liberty of stealing your thread… your string…"

"Our rope?"

"Yes, your rope. It's tied to the base of a pillar at the temple entrance a few dozen tail-flicks down, yes? You're going to swim down a ways and grab it and hold. Meanwhile I'll come after you with this bubble—it'll compress, you only have a few breaths but it should do. Just stick your head in here—" The Zora grasped the corners of his unfolded pouch and pinched them together, shaping it back into a loose bag. "It's a good pouch. If I need something to stay dry, I'll twist and turn and fold the skin so much no water can get through and tie it to my waist, correct? But see, I can take it like this…" He slipped into the water and submerged its corners, nodding at the pocket of air that bobbed inside it. "And hold your breaths for you."

Impa crossed her arms. "That might work. And if we need more air, my harp is always ready."

"I wish our instruments could be so useful," Ralis smiled. "All right, so you have to dive to grab the rope. Link, you are bringing your sword and your shell—wait—shield?"

"It can't hurt," Impa answered for him. "You never know what we're going to find."

"It will help you sink at least. All right, then! Eesh, I'm too excited—" Ralis turned on his back and splashed a wide foot across the surface, propelling him into the pool. "You have the seaweed scroll I gave you? Good! Then we're ready to dive."

Impa and Link followed him into the water. The Zora clasped his whale-skin balloon of air as he kicked, leading them to the far side of the pool, while Link struggled to stay afloat under the weight of his sword and shield. Ralis slowed and floated, turning to them and giving them a double-lidded wink before diving beneath the surface. Impa followed, and after a few deep breaths, Link stilled his hands and feet and sank after her.

A few feet below him swayed the rope, and as he descended, he feared his gear would drag him faster than Impa or Ralis could follow. He kicked and waved his arms, somehow keeping pace beside Impa as she pulled herself downward along the rope.

"Good, I'll be right here when you need a breath." Link almost couldn't recognize Ralis' voice. It rang clear and smooth through the water, devoid of that eerie gurgle. It was beautiful, traveling elegantly through its natural medium—and Link couldn't help but grin. It had been a while since he'd heard a noise completely new to him.

Impa's harp, too, sounded strange (more so than usual). When she gripped the rope in the crook of her knee and played air into their bubble, it echoed with an almost disturbing thickness. The whole experience was certainly eerie, but the beauty of Link's surroundings glossed over his anxiety with a watery sheen. Buildings carved of white stone rose around him, decorated with pillars of shells, and gardens of swaying weeds and moss. Schools of shining fish flitted about him in the blue light, and below him, a grand, intricate temple rose from the sand, with natural spires of rock and domes of mossy boulders. He sank, captivated so much by the sight of the geometric carvings, the arches of white stone and the colorful life that made its home on it, he almost forgot to breathe. But when he remembered, Ralis was above him and Impa beside him, keeping him safe and alive on his journey downward.

When his feet touched the bottom, puffing up a cloud of sand, he steadied himself with the nearest rock. Before him loomed the entrance to the temple, a thick, white wall of stone. He wondered briefly if this was some sort of plug, and if they managed to open it, the Domain's water would drain into the river, carrying them with it.

"Good," came the excited tenor of Ralis' voice. "See if you can't crack it open, will you?"

Impa took one last breath from the bag, then twisting the rope around her ankle, raised her lyre and strummed. A sharp, deep rumble emanated from the harp, hitting Link's chest with such an impact half his held breath bubbled from his mouth and floated toward the surface. The sand shifted around his feet as she plucked, but with each note, a tiny crack wound its way across the front of the massive slab. Her face contorted in effort, a few bubbles wandered from her nose and past her waving hair, her hands moving heavy and slow through the water, but the strings vibrated with the same magic they did in air. She had certainly improved this particular song since their failure to break into the Colossus the same way.

With a fierce glissando, a large fissure ran up the rock's center. A thick, resounding boom shook sand up from the bottom and the stone slab fell away, each piece of it crashing into the soft bed of the Domain, sinking for a few seconds into the loose earth. It hadn't even settled when Ralis, ecstatic, let out a tuneful shout and wriggled toward the entrance, bag of air still in hand. The light shone on his fins as he rippled past the stones, disappearing into the darkness with a few powerful kicks of his finned feet.

Impa glanced back at Link before swimming after the Zora, harp clutched in one hand. Link followed, the last of his air trickling from his nose to rise to the light far above him. He shook his head, telling his lungs to cease their aching, and desperately swam after Impa into the darkness.

He burst from the black water with a frantic gasp. He groped around him for any solid structure, any sign of Impa, but his hands just splashed through empty water.

"Sorry," came the gurgling voice of Ralis. "In the moment I, um, forgot about your non-gills."

"Where's Impa?"

"Here." Her voice was calm but breathless. "There's dry rock over here."

Link followed their voices and pulled himself onto the outcropping. As he knelt and tried to slow his breathing, a faint bluish glow crept into the corners of his vision. He lifted his head and as his eyes adjusted, he could spy streaks and swirls of blue-white light, smeared across the walls and floor of the chamber like rivers of stars bleeding across the sky.

"What's that light?" he asked.

"I think it's moss," Impa answered.

"Actually," Ralis said, "it's tiny creatures that live inside the moss. I read about it once."

"Great. Glad to know." Impa pulled Link to his feet. "You all right?"

"I think so."

"Splendous," Ralis answered, folding his length of whale skin expertly around his waist and twisting it into its intended pouch-like shape. "If you would so please to hand me my book, I will be our guide." Link dug it from his pocket and handed it over, slimy and glistening, and the Zora opened it up. "Onward then."

It was easy to follow Ralis. Not only did he reflect the moss's glow like a moving beacon, but the way his fins flopped on the stone was a truly amazing sight. Link couldn't take his eyes off the Zora, or the childish way he threw out his arms to balance as he wiggled with clumsy ferocity down the hall. The uncoordinated stomp, the determined flail—Ralis walked just like Zelda.

Link stifled his laugh as the Zora led them along the passageway, stopping only to admire the geometric patterns on the walls and the way the moss grew perfectly in their ledges and depressions.

"These are like the halls in the other shrines," Ralis said excitedly. "They can go for miles—we might surface in Lake Hylia if we walk far enough. Oh, eesh, I should map them out, yes I should."

"We don't really have time for that," Impa told him. She kept her distance from the glowing moss and the eerie, translucent vines growing across the walls and ceiling, and slapped Link's curious hand when he reached out for one. He retracted his fingers, and supposed he couldn't fault her for being duly cautious.

"Yes, right, we must get to the waterclock." Ralis turned a corner, waving for them to follow.

"I thought you were going to help us look for our sword," Impa said.

"I _am_. And you're going to protect me as I behold the wonders of my people's ingeniousity."

"Protect you from what?" Link couldn't help but ask, but the Zora was already on a different subject.

"It's just beyond here, if we turn left," Ralis squeaked in excitement. He followed behind them, relaying instructions, keeping one black eye on the book and the other ahead of him. "Ah, interesting—so here it says we have to pass through a trial, a dangerous trial—no, not a trial, just a hallway. My mistake."

"How did you mistake one for the other?" Impa asked. She led the way, one hand resting cautiously on her harp strings.

"They're the same word in some contexts," Ralis said. "It's a Zora usage. You swim through a little passage, like a tunnel or cave—there's bound to be a challenge there, correct? A giant eel, a ring of poison coral." He almost tripped on his wide feet and recovered, releasing a watery gurgle of what may have been satisfaction. "Ah, beyond the hall is the clock, and then a little shrine. You might find what you're looking for there. Around the shrine is where the cleaner used to live. Look." Link stopped to eye Ralis' greenish parchment and saw something that just looked like a splatter of spilled ink.

"It's supposed to—oh, it's a devourer. It can absorb… hm… what's the word, like corruption. Like, dirty things, waste. It can eat anything. Such size—what a sea cucumber it must've been!" Ralis laughed and turned the page as Link trotted closer to Impa. "It cleans the blades of the clock and keeps them shiny-new."

They kept an eye out for anything creeping from the shadows—any giant spiders or witch's familiars, any violent amphibians or carnivorous plants, but the halls were still and silent, glowing peacefully in the moss-light. The only sounds were the slaps of Ralis' flat feet and the eager, sloppy turn of seaweed pages.

"So," Ralis started again, breaking the tenuous quiet. "Right here is a little stair and a hallway—looks like its already been drained for us.

"Does your book say anything about any swords?" Impa asked.

"No. I don't even know if there would be a word for it. Maybe… some variation on 'spear'? Or 'tooth'?" He quieted, turning the pages and burying what little nose he had into the paper. "I still hope everything works. How much of a disappointment to find it's all rusted."

"It hasn't been that long since your people left," Impa said. "Maybe… twenty-five years? Surely that's not long enough to have everything crumble completely."

"It's long to me. Much before I was hatched."

"How old are you, Ralis?" Link asked.

"Eesh…" He stopped, holding his book with one hand and counting on his fingers with the other. "Forty and… three eighths." With that the Zora jumped ahead, satisfied with his answer, and trotted down the stairs on awkward finned feet.

"What?" Link asked, well after Ralis had stopped listening.

"Zora use a lunar calendar," Impa said from behind him. "Forty months. He's about three years old."

Link's whisper couldn't mask his surprise. "Then he's barely older than little Zee."

"Zora have to grow up fast. You don't think guppies can stay small for long with so many bigger fish out there, do you?"

"I suppose not."

"Zora have six or so eggs every time they lay," Impa continued. "Or, at least that's what I've read. Usually only one survives long enough to develop its limbs and a proper tail fin. But once they reach adulthood, they're remarkably long-lived."

Link tried to imagine Ralis without his arms or legs, poking his tiny head from an egg the size of one of Irma's potatoes. "What do they look like when they hatch?"

"Ugly."

"Now is the hallway!" Ralis called from below. As they reached him, Link almost had to shield his eyes from the light. On one wall sat rows and rows of thick moss, glowing bright in deliberate patterns, the other was a curved wall of smooth white stone. Between them stretched a thin walkway of polished rock, flanked on either side by deep water.

Link stepped after Ralis into the light of the hall. The mosaics of glowing moss illuminated their path and cast their shadows onto the opposite wall. Link couldn't help but watch his own shape deform and flicker. The arch of his neck seemed too long, the wooden shield sitting on his back curved almost like a shell, his legs and arms were stretched and his hands too big—it almost made him laugh to see himself slink across the wall like a lanky sea creature. He lost his smile when he spied something moving behind his shadow, a little ripple in the sheet of darkness. He turned, twisting on wet boots to face whatever creature had crept up beside him on the walkway, but he saw only empty, shining stone.

"It is like, what's the word, art, maybe—no, no, illusion," Ralis said excitedly, drawing Link's attention back to the wall. The Zora spread his fins and lifted himself on his toes, casting the shadow of a giant fish on the wall. He moved his long hands and made jaws for it, laughing as they snapped eerily at nothing. Impa just lingered in the rear, sighing, with eyes only for their destination.

Link paused to watch the flapping jaws of Ralis' giant fish for a moment, before his own shadow caught his eye once more. As he moved, as he turned his head to get a better look at it, it stood unnaturally still. When he moved his hands, his shadow didn't, when he reached out for Impa his own shape just stood, defiant, tall and motionless.

"Impa," he whispered, not taking his eyes off the shadow.

"What is it?" He swung his arms to show her, but she didn't seem to notice. "What do you see?"

When Impa's shadow moved, reaching out for his own, he turned, expecting her hand to grasp his. But she just stood, both hands on her harp, eyes wandering between him and his shadow in confusion. Ralis, too, stilled to watch him as he gestured to the wall, but the Zora's shadow distorted and wriggled, growing taller and wider, billowing and twisting and towering over his own.

Link's shadow stood petrified as the two around it swirled like water into eerily recognizable shapes. Impa's frame changed to the shape of a long-haired woman, Ralis' fish wriggled and deformed, fins becoming a broad cloak, teeth curving to sit on the top of its head like a crown. Link could not help but take a step away from the wall as the shadows advanced on his. The woman's shape danced as she reached for him—he could see every detail of her, each knob of the braids piled atop her head, her fingernails, the needle she held so delicately between them—

The scars on his lips seared white-hot. He raised his hand to the punctures, but it did nothing to stop the sudden stinging. He wavered, eyes glued to the wall before him, as the shadows reached out for his own. The large figure gripped his hand and twisted, and a very real pain made its way from the tips of his fingers to his elbow.

 _Traitorous, thankless bastard._

The words were voiceless but rang clear enough in his head. Somewhere behind him, he knew Impa and Ralis were calling out to him, but their voices faded in the deafening silence of the shadows. He could hear nothing, no gurgle of water around him, not even his own heaving breaths as the larger figure drew a blade and raised it to him.

 _You are broken. You aren't fit to shovel horse shit._

Link desperately willed his shadow to draw its sword, told it again and again in his head to turn and strike at the figures around him, but it just stood still, helpless and silent between its adversaries. The blade of the larger silhouette met his shadow's hand and cut it off in a spatter of painful black, harsh against the pearly stone of the wall. Link's own wrist stung, and he fell to one knee. His whole arm burned, and as the figure stepped over his collapsed shadow, sword raised, he begged it to stand, begged it to reach up and draw, to get up and fight.

 _You are not worthy even to aspire to be a palace slave. You are nothing._

His real fingers gripped the hilt of his sword, and slowly, shakily, his shadow followed suit, moving its remaining hand to its shoulder. But the King's form was on him before he could draw, blade outthrust toward his middle. A searing pain jolted its way from Link's stomach to every inch of him, to every end of every detestable nerve, and he released a cry. Instinct forced him to draw his sword and strike, blind with pain, one hand clutching his stomach where the imaginary steel had slid into him. His shadow followed, thin silhouette of sword slicing at the King's. The taller figure slipped out of the way, cape billowing and spitting darkness against the wall, as both Link and his shadow rose from the floor.

It was then that the darkness took hold of the world, and he lost control.


	72. The Clear Waters of Time

"The phrase 'cleanliness is next to godliness,' which mothers so often use to encourage their children to wash, actually comes from a slight mistranslation of an ancient Zora phrase (unpronounceable above water). The phrase _directly_ translates to 'godliness is godliness', which, though a tautology in our language, has great meaning for the Zora, since the words for clean and holy are one and the same—though it must be noted that the Zora notion of 'clean' far differs from the Hylian one. Dirtiness is both an interruption of order and an subversion of morality. It is a corruption in every sense of the word."

Ernst Shad, _The Student's Companion to Lost Languages_

* * *

Link, only partially of his own volition, rose from the ground, sword sharp and ready and black as night. He could see nothing but shadows around him—he could feel nothing but cold. Even his own skin had lost its whitish hue, and as he swung his sword blindly, it was in a hand that did not look entirely like his own. The darkness around him overtook his senses—the sharp, smoky scent of the King, the heat of a rova's presence behind him—he felt himself swipe at a barrage of intangible attacks. He cut through a smell, he raised his shield to a gaze, twisted his body to avoid an onslaught of witchlike laughter. His gut seared inside him, his hands ached, the scars on his lips burned bright like a baleful asterism.

He could almost make out their faces. When he struck at one opponent and turned to the other, he could see the curves of thick lips, the glint of a yellow eye, a streak of red hair in the darkness. He thrust to the shadow of Barudi, but his black sword cut through air as the woman retreated. The shadows of her face furled in concern, her hands raised in capitulation, but he knew better than to believe it.

He looked into her shining pupils and saw himself, red-eyed and filled with fury, and suddenly his hand gripped not the blackened hilt of his sword but a makeshift bludgeon, a steel tong with a sharpened end. A fire roared behind him, a fox watched him carefully, and the gods of darkness themselves descended to give him this second chance. He could do it, he knew he could—he could end Barudi here and now, he could turn on the King and surprise him, he could save Impa and escape back into the city—

He launched himself at her with a cry of determination, raising his weapon high in his shadowy hand, and threw all his weight behind the blow. He kept his eyes fixed to her forehead, to the spot just above her evil eyes, and curved his body, from his ankle to his arm, to perfectly land this single, decisive blow.

A wave of sound hit him in the middle, throwing him back onto the stone. He tumbled, sheets of black air swirling around him, and the vision of Barudi relented for a split second. He held fast to his weapon and slid to a stop, pulling himself to his aching knees and throwing back his head. He tried to make out figures in the darkness around him, but the shadows pressed heavily on his shoulders, flowed over his face like a surge of water, and he was too weak to push through it.

 _Of course you're too weak. Of course. You have failed so many times before. Anyone can look at your body and see proof of it._

He groaned, leaning on his sword and struggling to his feet. Every mark on him burned with stinging pain, from the pinpricks on his lips to his brand, from the mild scars of scraped knees to the dramatic lashes on his back. But he didn't let the pain stop him.

As he swung and parried, pangs of exhaustion burned through his muscles. Every darkness inside him came to the surface, pouring from him, and no matter which he cut down, it would rematerialize tenfold, springing up like unanswerable questions, undeniable accusations, a thousand fingers pointing, mouths laughing, a thousand soundless insults he had endured for years but never been able to hear. They tore at him, wearing him down, dancing around the blade of his useless sword and bursting with accusations of his failures. Every dark thought was an enemy, every mistake a monster. And there were far too many.

 _They are you_ , came the echo of that terrible voice. _You cannot fight them, you cannot escape them._

He wavered, dark hand shaking on his hilt. He could only acknowledge the truth of those words, a truth he did not want to confront. When he stilled, he could spy the shadows pulsate, as if mirroring his reluctance to strike. When he stared into the darkness, into Barudi, and Alda, and all of Obra Garud, he could feel it staring back.

A horrible thought occurred to him at that moment, but he couldn't deny it. It swept through him like a harrowing certainty, and suddenly he couldn't bring himself to raise his sword again.

 _They are me_ , he dared himself to think. His fear mounted as the shadows descended on him, but he forced his hand to his side. _They are me, and I cannot win against them. I cannot escape myself._

It took every ounce of strength in him to surrender. With a shaking, protesting hand, he forced himself to drop his weapon. _And so I will accept them._

He closed his eyes, lowered his head, and let the shadows win.

When they wrapped around him, they were warm. They held him upright—he felt a soft breath on his ear, he felt a warm cheek on his. He breathed in, his heart thumping inside him, his pain subsiding. The darkness retreated to the edges of his vision, and he heard a voice from far away, descending through the misty dark and into his ear.

"Remember what the elder gave you."

He reached up a hand to his chest and found the wooden charm there, safe and warm, and he squeezed it. Slowly, his agony vanished, his fear crept back into the darkness, and as he closed his eyes, he could see Merel's fire-lit face, smiling as she held his injured hand.

 _Do not let the phantoms of your past hinder you. Do not let them hurt you._

He didn't want to tell her it wasn't something he could help. But he tried anyway, recalling the fire of her serene cave, the faces of his companions, Impa's lips meeting his own. He gripped the charm in his hand until he could feel nothing else, nothing but wood beneath his fingers.

"I'm tired, Impa. I'm so tired of being scared."

He didn't know if he said it aloud. He could not hear his own voice, but when he opened his eyes, he saw he was looking over Impa's shoulder. Ralis stood a few feet away, black eyes wide, fins raised like hackles from his defensive limbs. He felt Impa's arms squeeze him, felt her hands on his back and her lips against his ear. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"Yes."

She let him go and backed away, crossing her arms. "That was… quite strange."

"Such drama!" Ralis called. He gripped his seaweed tome to him, spiny fins relaxing once more against his body.

"You stared at your shadow for minutes," Impa said. "You wouldn't answer me, you wouldn't look at me. Then you drew your sword and turned on us."

"I… I saw things," he answered. He slid his blade safely back into its scabbard.

"Like I said," Ralis gesticulated something Link didn't understand. " _Illusion_."

"I'm sorry," Link grimaced. "I didn't… hurt you, did I?"

"No," Impa answered.

"You tried," Ralis put in.

She shrugged. "He's not wrong. You really did try. But you… well, after I managed to throw you back, you got up and started fighting… well, nothing. You were fighting so hard, but after a while, you… went quiet, dropped your sword and said you were tired."

"Oh."

"Are you sure you're all right now?" She reached for his sword and reluctantly handed it back to him.

"Don't," Ralis squeaked. "Don't trust him with anything sharp after that disastrophe."

"I'm all right," he said. He rubbed his arm where Impa's music had thrown him against the stone. "Don't worry about me, Ralis. Impa's really practiced that harp."

She smiled. "I think this counts as our first quarrel, don't you?"

He forced himself to smile. He rolled his shoulder, turned to follow her and Ralis to the end of the moss-lit hallway, and into the darkness beyond.

* * *

"You again!" Talm shouted, and Palo could not tell if she was pleased or angry. "Are you following me?"

The Knight held still, arm pinned in a practiced Sheikah hold. Near his collarbone, right above the hilt of Palo's knife, a familiar insignia of House Elanor shone in golden thread. When he twitched his eyes in Talm's direction, Palo pressed the blade a little harder to his skin. "Easy, kid," he breathed.

"I asked if you were following me," Talm demanded.

The young man's eyes returned to Palo. " _He_ is the one following you."

Palo supposed it made sense, from an Ordish perspective. With a Sheikah-looking fellow stalking the footsteps of a lady like Talm, any righteous Knight's mind would jump to only one conclusion. He considered cutting the kid's face, just a little. But he held the knife still, relieved that it was only the boy Talm had befriended earlier that day, and not one of the palace guard. "Are you all right?" the man asked, grip unrelenting. "Run if you need to."

"I'm not running," Talm said. Her voice quavered with either worry or amusement. "You two, back away from each other."

"My lady?" The Ordishman's voice was hoarse with surprise.

"That's my… um… that's my servant you attacked just now. Of _course_ he's following me around."

 _Oh gods above, Talm._ Palo had to keep from rolling his eyes as he lowered his knife. "You'd best not damage my lady's property," he said.

The Knight stumbled from Palo and bowed his head toward Talm. "Forgive me, but you understand it's my duty to watch over the citizens of this district. I thought you needed my assistance."

"Well, I don't, and _look_ , you've bruised him."

Palo raised his eyebrow at her as she strode over and brushed off his shoulder. The Knight tilted his head, trying to make out some discoloration on Palo's dark skin. He figured the Ordishman wouldn't bother to take the time to examine him, so he feigned a little pain.

"Please accept my sincerest apologies, my lady," the young Knight said, falling to one knee. "It is a time of unrest. We are all a little more on edge than usual."

"What's your name?" Talm asked.

"Sir Aelrich of House Elanor. Please, allow me to escort you home. It is an ungodly hour to be out on the streets."

"I'm well aware of that," Talm snapped. Her irritability was convincing, but Palo knew she had started to enjoy herself. "So you may escort me to my inn if you wish."

"I do wish." The kid rose and glanced over his shoulder at Palo, who lowered his head and took on a subservient gait. He couldn't say he appreciated Talm's new assignment of his identity, but at least now he wouldn't have to wear that makeup and itchy muffler. "Tell me, are you travelers? Are you not Ordish?" the Knight asked.

"No, we're not," Talm answered, taking his hand when he offered it. "I'm the Lady Talm of Eldoran."

The boy grinned. "It's a strange name—well, forgive me, I do not mean strange, I mean unique—"

"It comes from the forests of Eldin, where my father is from. It is a rather nice name, don't you think?"

"Absolutely. I have never heard a prettier one."

For the second time that night, Palo wished, just a little, to lay down and die. "And this is my Sheikah servant," Talm said, glancing over her shoulder. "I just call him Servant. In Eldoran anyone who's anyone hires one. His kind are quite loyal, you know."

Make that the third time that night.

"Really? I have been told otherwise," the Knight said.

 _I will kill you Talm, I swear to all the gods._

"So what has brought you to Ordona, my lady? It is a dangerous time to travel."

"Well," Talm started. She turned her head to give Palo a conspiratorial look. "It has always been my dream to see the great library of the Knights of Hylia."

"Indeed it is great, Lady Talm, that much is known the world over. But no one who is not a Knight may enter it. I'm terribly sorry."

"Oh, surely you let in a few guests, especially Eldine nobility."

"No… nobility?" The kid seemed taken aback for a moment. "Forgive me, my lady, but our rules are very strict—"

"Well, can you at least _talk_ to them for me? You're a Knight, aren't you? You're all about fairness and goodness, right? You've embarrassed me and hurt my servant, and if you want to make it up to me, you'll at least vouch for me. What harm could it do?"

"I… I suppose you're right," Aelrich said, and Palo sung a few praises to her in his head.

"Oh, thank you so much," Talm said, gripping his hand until his ears turned a lovely shade of red. "You truly are a good man."

He swallowed audibly, trying to wriggle his fingers out of hers as politely as he could. "V-very well. I will talk to my brothers. If I may… escort you to Relta, I can take you to our headquarters."

"I don't have a place to stay there, though," Talm said.

The Knight walked in awkward silence for a moment. "You are… you are welcome, if you are weary, to stay at my family's manor."

"Splendid!" Talm cried out. Her smile was radiant, genuine, and Palo couldn't help but find himself unsurprised. Of course she would take every opportunity she could to get out of staying in a ratty, bug-infested inn. "I will be so honored."

"You will like my family's library, if you are fond of books," the boy continued. "Though it is not nearly as big as the one at our headquarters. My sister will show you around the shelves—she's read everything on them at least twice. She's been trying to worm her way into the Knights' library for months now."

"Really?"

"My family is quite educated, you see…" The Knight expatiated for some time about the honor of his House, about the beauty of his hometown and the charm of the southern forests, and Palo could not help but wonder if Talm had targeted this Knight in particular because of his house. The Elanor family owned hundreds of miles of land in the south of Ordona; maybe she had figured that on one of these plots there may have stood the ruins of a shrine or temple with a connection to a particular legendary sword. The way she feigned interest, laughter, shock, all were so meticulously crafted he could not help but think even their chance meeting had been a part of some strategy of hers. Palo only wished she had shared this with him beforehand. He didn't appreciate being left several steps behind in her game plan.

When they arrived at the inn (Aelrich had taken great care to lead them through the emptier, safer streets, which subjected Palo to an extra half hour of idle, intolerable conversation and more than a few crowds of wandering ghosts), the Knight bowed deeply and lay a gentle kiss on Talm's hand.

"My lady," he said. "You are… you are a water lily among reeds. Truly a lovely woman. I am glad you gave me the honor of walking with you. Hopefully I have made up to you for my mistakes."

"More than enough," Talm said. "So, shall I expect to see you tomorrow to take me to Relta?"

"Oh… my lady, no. I must stay here. Only after Ordon City is saved and the Hyrulean King driven from these lands may I return to my home."

 _You're going to return to your home when the King burns down this city and your commander calls a retreat,_ Palo thought, but kept his mouth shut.

"Such a shame!" Talm said. "I was going to leave quite soon. You must come with me."

"Forgive me, but my duty is here. When I am finished I would be more than happy to."

"Well, perhaps you might draft a note of commendation for me so I may show it to your brothers."

"Of… of course," the kid said. His doubt was almost palpable, but so was his awe of her. "I will begin one tonight. But be aware that it will not necessarily grant you entrance."

"I know," she said. "But your effort is all I want."

"Try I will, my lady. Goodnight."

He kissed her hand again and watched them retreat into the inn. Thank all the gods, the innkeeper had gone to sleep and wasn't around to witness Lady Talm's husband change race sometime while he was out.

When they got back to their room, Talm threw herself on the three-legged bed, which deposited her, as expected, onto the floor. She didn't seem to mind; she just lay there with a grin on her face. "All in all an interesting night," she said.

"An impressive night, I have to admit. You played that boy like a goddamn lyre." He instinctively reached to his waistband for a bag of firegrass that wasn't there. Gods damn, he'd have to get to sleep the old fashioned way, tossing and turning and failing to count sheep. "You could've come up with something better than 'servant', though."

"One that he would've believed? I don't think so."

"Next time, say I'm your bodyguard."

Talm laughed and pulled herself from the floor. "All right. I'm sorry, Palo. It was all I could think of in the moment."

"Well, at least now my disguise won't require me to wear that makeup and those itchy Ordish clothes."

"I suppose not, but you seem to have missed the true lesson here."

"And what is that?"

Her grin was contagious. "Beauty _does_ pay."

* * *

"This is it! This is the waterclock!"

It hardly needed saying. It was apparent in that room of turning gears, spotless glinting blades that sliced through air and water in smooth silence, wheels that turned under flowing rivulets and sprays of steam, all whirring in perfect harmony with the precision of gravity's pull. Link spent close to a full minute in silence staring at its many pulleys, chains, cords and conduits, and he still could not fathom an inch of it. Decorative elements were woven perfectly into the bodies of machinery—statuettes, intricate gratings and gold-plated markings, but Link couldn't spy a clock face for the life of him.

"How do you read time from it?" he whispered to Impa.

"Don't ask. I have this feeling Ralis will spend a few hours explaining it to us."

The Zora in question was leaning over the side of their little catwalk, staring down into the depths of the machinery. "They say the waters of the eternal river flow down there," he jittered. "It's supposed to go up through these tubes here into the body of the clock at an exact pace…"

"Looks like we didn't need to ask," Impa sighed.

At the slow turning of a nearby blade, something met Link's ears. "Do you hear that?" he asked Impa.

"Well, I hear water flowing, ticking, a few creaks, though the whole thing is remarkably rust-free…"

"No I mean that whistling. It's almost like a voice."

"You must be hearing the blades."

"I think it's… something else." It was the first time in his life he could hear something others could not, and as he crept closer to the clock, he had to follow the sound. "Impa, look over there. That's where it's coming from." He pointed to a massive gear, slowly turning parallel to the ground, intricately woven with steel and stone like spiny fins. At its center stood a figure, possibly a Zora queen or an interpretation of Nayru, spinning in a gown of watery stone like a figurine in a music box.

As he stepped toward the sharp gear, Impa gripped his elbow and Ralis popped up from the other side of shining pulleys with a warning: "Don't touch anything! If you get it dirty there's no telling what will happen."

Link kept his eyes on the statue. At its feet, propping up one of the hems of her finlike dress, shone a small length of bluish metal. In the half-second of recognition, his heart soared into his throat. He succumbed to a moment of unparalleled irrationality, when he knew for a fact the metal had led him there, that it had been singing at him from a distance, urging him to look its way. "Impa, it's there. Look at her feet."

"I… gods above, think you're actually right. It looks like… ah, you see that crack up her leg? It looks like one of the engineers was looking around the temple for a quick fix. This might've been in a room nearby."

"Do you think they knew what it was?" he asked.

Impa shrugged. "Zora are practical beings. They would've used what they could, at least until they could find something better."

"But then they had to leave," Link finished. "I just hope it's not stuck too far into the stone for me to get out."

"I don't like the look of those spinning blades, either. Hey Ralis, how do we get this thing to stop for a minute?"

He looked at her was such dismay Link feared the Zora might slap her across the face with his fin. "You _don't_! It will disrupt the entire order of the world! Time will cease to be as we know it and—"

"It'll just be for a second. Our sword, it turns out, is at the feet of Nayru there."

"There _is_ no stopping it! It runs on forever like the eternal waters of the world. Eesh, have you not been listening to my words?"

Impa glanced over at Link, who approached the turning gear. As he crept toward it, the whistling in his ears only grew stronger.

"Be careful!" Ralis screeched. "Don't wreck anything, don't smudge anything—don't leave your prints—"

"And don't die," Impa said.

Link judged the best angle to jump from the catwalk to the gear, mentally measuring the distance between solid stone and mechanical surface. He gulped, muttered a little prayer, and gave himself a running start. He soared through the air, heart in his throat, and landed safely atop the turning gear. He slid on slick metal to the center, where the little decoration stood, and quelled the uneasy feeling in his stomach. He tried not to look at the world turning around him, or at the seemingly infinite darkness beyond the intricate lattice of metal under his feet. He made his way slowly to the center of the gear, focusing on the statue's lovely face, half fish and half human. When he reached the cracked statue, he gently prodded at her base, testing if she could stand on her own. He supposed it didn't matter; despite Ralis' pleas, Link would have to take the blade regardless of the consequences.

So he gathered the courage left inside him and pulled at it with all his might. He pinched its flat sides as tightly as he could, and with surprisingly little resistance, the blade slid from between the statue and its base. Link stepped back across the gear, eyes on the stone woman, waiting for her to fall, for her to crumble into pieces and clog the gears of the waterclock. But the statue did not move. It only continued to spin, though certainly more precariously than it had before. Link turned back to the pair waiting for him, and flashed a grin. He held up the piece of metal, expecting returned smiles, but Ralis just pointed at him and screeched.

He glanced over barely in time to see a drop of his blood fall from the blade in his palm. All eyes were on the little red bead as it trickled from his skin and fell through the air. The single droplet struck the lattice of metal with an almost audible drip, and followed the pull of gravity through the intricate designs and into the darkness of the river below. Link stared at the little red stain it left behind before cupping his free hand under the blade and making his way, half panicked, back to the edge of the gear.

When he landed on solid ground again, the world slowly stopped spinning, and the whistling in his ears receded back to the slight hush of whirring blades.

"I knew we shouldn't trust you with anything sharp!" Ralis said. "Now you've smudged the whole thing."

"I'm sorry, Ralis," Link said, tucking the metal into the small pack at his waist.

"You really should stop grabbing those shards like you do," Impa said. "You still have a scab from last time."

"It's so _unfair,_ " the Zora pouted, like a true forty-month-old. "There are still… seventeen places on the waterclock I wanted to see, and now you've _ruined_ it with your filthy… whatever it is that's inside you."

"Blood," he answered.

"Wait, really?" Ralis perked his head up, curiosity overriding his anger for a moment. "Then why isn't it blue?"

"Shh!" Impa started, ripping her harp from her back. "Listen."

Beyond the whirring of gears and the rush of water, Link could make out a distinct clicking, a scraping wholly separate from the sounds of the clock. Ralis' fins rose like hackles and he stared at the ceiling. "Oh… oh, Nayru's love, if that thing is still alive it's going to clean up in here. Blood is not a good thing to get in the gears."

"Well, we'd best get going if there's some creature wandering around down here," Impa whispered. "Follow me. And Link—stop bleeding. You'll only lead it to us."

"I'm sorry," he breathed, squeezing his finger as best he could. As he crept, he still left a few drops behind him, which he tried to smear into the wet stone with his boot.

"I want to look at some glyphs and shrines on the way out," Ralis whispered.

" _No_ ," Impa hissed back. "Are you insane?"

"Sometimes the elderfish say so."

She glanced over her shoulder at the Zora as she rounded a shadowy corner. "We need to be _especially_ cautious—"

With a clatter of harp strings and equipment, Impa stumbled back, reeling from some impact. As she rolled from her back to her knees, Link rushed forward, drawing his sword, preparing for a gnash of white teeth, the glow of a sinister lure, the whip of a poisoned antenna. But his sword met the length of a carefully-crafted fishbone spear, adorned with teeth and swung by a thick, shell-armored arm. Link froze—he raised his shield only to stave off another strike from the weapon, but didn't retaliate against the heavily muscled Zora who wielded it. Impa stilled on the ground behind him, unwilling to strum an attack, and from the darkness stormed a smaller, shapelier Zora, amphibious skin glowing salmon-pink with rage.

"Ralis!" her voice crashed like a wave. "I knew we would find you here!"

Ralis grimaced and lifted his book like a shield. For a moment Link swore he saw a flash of fear in his beady black eyes. "Er… hello, my siblings," he stuttered. "Fins been damp lately?"

* * *

Hey friends! March will be slowing down for me, thank god, so I'm thinking about moving updates back to Tuesdays. Does anyone have any preference? Honestly, I can do either.


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